“Ye gods and little fishes!” he said.  “Another redhead!  Why, we’re as alike as two carrots off the same bunch!”

In five minutes I knew how old he was, and where he was raised, and that what he wanted more than anything on earth was a little farmhouse with chickens and a cow.

“Where you can have air, you know,” he said, waving his hands, which were covered with reddish hair.  “Lord, in the city I starve for air!  And where, when you’re getting soft you can go out and tackle the wood-pile.  That’s living!”

And then he wanted to know what he was to do at the sanatorium and I told him as well as I could.  I didn’t tell him everything, but I explained why Mr. Pierce was calling himself Carter, and about the two in the shelter-house.  I had to.  He knew as well as I did that three days before Mr. Pierce had had nothing to his name but a folding automobile road map or whatever it was.

“Good for old Pierce!” he said when I finished.  “He’s a prince, Miss Waters.  If you’d seen him sending those girls back to town—­well, I’ll do all I can to help him.  But I’m not much of a doctor.  It’s safe to acknowledge it; you’ll find it out soon enough.”

Mr. and Mrs. Van Alstyne came in just then, and Mr. Sam told him what he was expected to do.  It wasn’t much:  he was to tell them at what temperatures to take their baths, “and Minnie will help you out with that,” he added, and what they were to eat and were not to eat.  “Minnie will tell you that, too,” he finished, and Mr. Barnes, doctor Barnes, came over and shook my hand.

“I’m perfectly willing to be first assistant,” he declared.  “We’ll put our heads together and the result will be—­”

“Combustion!” said Mr. Sam, and we all laughed.

“Remember,” Mr. Sam instructed him, as Doctor Barnes started out, “when you don’t know what to prescribe, order a Turkish bath.  The baths are to a sanatorium what the bar is to a club—­they pay the bills.”

Well, we got it all fixed and Doctor Barnes started out, but at the door he stopped.

“I say,” he asked in an undertone, “the stork doesn’t light around here, does he?”

“Not if they see him first!” I replied grimly, and he went out.

CHAPTER XIII

THE PRINCE—­PRINCIPALLY

It was all well enough for me to say—­as I had to to Tillie many a time—­that it was ridiculous to make a fuss over a person for what, after all, was an accident of birth.  It was well enough for me to say that it was only by chance that I wasn’t strutting about with a crown on my head and a man blowing a trumpet to let folks know I was coming, and by the same token and the same chance Prince Oskar might have been a red-haired spring-house girl, breaking the steels in her figure stooping over to ladle mineral water out of a hole in the earth.

Nevertheless, at five o’clock, after every one had gone, when I saw Miss Patty, muffled in furs, tripping out through the snow, with a tall thin man beside her, walking very straight and taking one step to her four, I felt as though somebody had hit me at the end of my breast-bone.