They stopped a minute outside before they came in, and I had to take myself in hand.

“Now look here, Minnie, you idiot,” I said to myself, “this is America; you’re as good as he is; not a bend of the knee or a stoop of the neck.  And if he calls you ‘my good girl’ hit him.”

They came in together, laughing and talking, and, to be honest, if I hadn’t caught the back of a chair, I’d have had one foot back of the other and been making a courtesy in spite of myself.

“We’re late, Minnie!” Miss Patty said.  “Oskar, this is one of my best friends, and you are to be very nice to her.”

He had one of those single glass things in his eye and he gave me a good stare through it.  Seen close he was handsomer than Mr. Pierce, but he looked older than his picture.

“Ask her if she won’t be nice to me,” he said in as good English as mine, and held out his hand.

“Any of Miss Patty’s friends—­” I began, with a lump in my throat, and gave his hand a good squeeze.  I thought he looked startled, and suddenly I had a sort of chill.

“Good gracious!” I exclaimed, “should I have kissed it?”

They roared at that, and Miss Patty had to sit down in a chair.

“You see, she knows, Oskar,” she said.  “The rest are thinking and perhaps guessing, but Minnie is the only one that knows, and she never talks.  Everybody who comes here tells Minnie his troubles.”

“But—­am I a trouble?” he asked in a low tone.  I was down in the spring, but I heard it.

“So far you have hardly been an unalloyed joy,” she replied, and from the spring I echoed “Amen.”

“Yes—­I’m so hung with family skeletons that I clatter when I walk,” I explained, pretending I hadn’t heard, and brought them both glasses of water.  “It’s got to be a habit with some people to save their sciatica and their husband’s dispositions and their torpid livers and their unpaid bills and bring ’em here to me.”

He sniffed at the glass and put it down.

“Herr Gott!” he said, “what a water!  It is—­the whole thing is extraordinary!  I can understand the reason for Carlsbad or Wiesbaden—­it is gay.  One sees one’s friends; it is—­social.  But here—!”

He got up and, lifting a window curtain, peered out into the snow.

“Here,” he repeated, “shut in by forests and hills, a thousand miles from life—­” He shrugged his shoulders and came back to the table.  “It is well enough for the father,” he went on to Miss Patty, “but for you!  Why—­it is depressing, gray.  The only bit of color in it all is—­here, in what you call the spring-house.”  I thought he meant Miss Patty’s cheeks or her lovely violet eyes, but he was looking at my hair.  I had caught his eye on it before, but this time he made no secret about it, and he sighed, for all the world as if it reminded him of something.  He went over to the slot-machine and stood in front of it, humming and trying the different combinations.  I must say he had a nice back.