I limped out in time to be on hand before Miss Cobb got there, but what with a chilblain on my heel and hardly any sleep for two nights—­not to mention my toe—­I wasn’t any too pleasant.

“It’s my opinion you’re overeating, Minnie,” Miss Cobb said.  “You’re skin’s a sight!”

“You needn’t look at it,” I retorted.

She burned the back of her neck just then and it was three minutes before she could speak.  When she could she was considerably milder.

“Just give it a twist or two, Minnie, won’t you?” she said, holding out the curler.  “I haven’t been able to sleep on the back of my head for three weeks.”

Well, I curled her hair for her and she told me about Miss Summers being still shut in her room, and how she’d offered Mike an extra dollar to give the white poodle a Turkish bath—­it being under the weather as to health—­and how Mike had soaked the little beast for an hour in a tub of water, forgetting the sulphur, and it had come out a sort of mustard color, and how Miss Summers had had hysterics when she saw it.

“Mike dipped him in bluing to bleach him again, or rather ’her’—­it’s name is Arabella—­” Miss Cobb said, “but all it did was to make it mottled like an Easter egg.  Everybody is charmed.  There were no dogs allowed while the old doctor lived.  Things were different.”

“Yes, things were different,” I assented, limping over to heat the curler.  “How—­how does Mr. Carter get along?”

Miss Cobb put down her hand-mirror and sniffed.

“Well,” she said, “goodness knows I’m no trouble maker, but somebody ought to tell that young man a few things.  He’s forever looking at the thermometer and opening windows.  I declare, if I hadn’t brought my woolen tights along I’d have frozen to death at breakfast.  Everybody’s complaining.”

I put that away in my mind to speak about.  It was only by nailing the windows shut and putting strips of cotton batting around the cracks that we’d ever been able to keep people there in the winter.  I had my first misgiving then.  Heaven knows I didn’t realize what it was going to be.

Well, by the evening of that day things were going fairly well.  Tillie brought out a basket every morning to me at the spring-house, fairly bursting with curiosity, and Mr. Sam got some canned stuff in Finleyville and took it after dark to the shelter-house.  But after the second day Mrs. Dicky got tired holding a frying-pan over the fire and I had to carry out at least one hot meal a day.

They got their own breakfast in a chafing-dish, or rather he got it and carried it to her.  And she’d sit on the edge of her cot, with her feet on the soap box—­the floor was drafty—­wrapped in a pink satin negligee with bands of brown fur on it, looking sweet and perfectly happy, and let him feed her boiled egg with a spoon.  I took them some books—­my Gray’s Anatomy, and Jane Eyre and Molly Bawn, by The Duchess, and the