“I don’t know,” I said; “I have been deaf since the last explosion!” And I went down the steps to the spring.  I heard the tap of his cane as he came across the floor, and I knew he was angry.

“Confound you, Minnie,” he exclaimed, “if I could get along without you I’d discharge you this minute.”

“And if I paid any attention to your discharging me I’d have been gone a dozen times in the last year,” I retorted.  “I’m not objecting to Mr. Dick coming here, am I?  Only don’t expect me to burst into song about it.  Shut the door behind you when you go out.”

But he didn’t go at once.  He stood watching me polish glasses and get the card-tables ready, and I knew he still had something on his mind.

“Minnie,” he said at last, “you’re a shrewd young woman—­maybe more head than heart, but that’s well enough.  And with your temper under control, you’re a capable young woman.”

“What has Mr. Dick been up to now?” I asked, growing suspicious.

“Nothing.  But I’m an old man, Minnie, a very old man.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” I exclaimed, alarmed.  “You’re only seventy.  That’s what comes of saying in the advertising that you are eighty—­to show what the springs have done for you.  It’s enough to make a man die of senility to have ten years tacked to his age.”

“And if,” he went on, “if anything happens to me, Minnie, I’m counting on you to do what you can for the old place.  You’ve been here a good many years, Minnie.”

“Fourteen years I have been ladling out water at this spring,” I said, trying to keep my lips from trembling.  “I wouldn’t be at home any place else, unless it would be in an aquarium.  But don’t ask me to stay here and help Mr. Dick sell the old place for a summer hotel.  For that’s what he’ll do.”

“He won’t sell it,” declared the old doctor grimly.  “All I want is for you to promise to stay.”

“Oh, I’ll stay,” I said.  “I won’t promise to be agreeable, but I’ll stay.  Somebody’ll have to look after the spring; I reckon Mr. Dick thinks it comes out of the earth just as we sell it, with the whole pharmacopoeia in it.”

Well, it made the old doctor happier, and I’m not sorry I promised, but I’ve got a joint on my right foot that throbs when it is going to rain or I am going to have bad luck, and it gave a jump then.  I might have known there was trouble ahead.

CHAPTER II

MISS PATTY ARRIVES

It was pretty quiet in the spring-house that day after the old doctor left.  It had started to snow and only the regulars came out.  What with the old doctor talking about dying, and Miss Patty Jennings gone to Mexico, when I’d been looking forward to her and her cantankerous old father coming to Hope Springs for February, as they mostly did, I was depressed all day.  I got to the point where Mr. Moody feeding nickels into the slot-machine with one hand and eating zwieback with the other made me nervous.  After a while he went to sleep over it, and when he had slipped a nickel in his mouth and tried to put the zwieback in the machine he muttered something and went up to the house.