Miss Patty came over and slipped her hand in mine.

“Well?” she whispered, looking at me with her pretty eyebrows raised.

“He looks all right,” I had to confess.  “Perhaps you can coax him to shave.”

She laughed.

“Oskar!” she called, “you have passed, but you are conditioned.  Minnie objects to the mustache.”

He turned and looked at me gravely.

“It is my—­greatest attraction,” he declared, “but it is also a great care.  If Miss Minnie demands it, I shall give it to her in a—­in a little box.”  He sauntered over and looked at me in his audacious way.  “But you must promise to care for it.  Many women have loved it.”

“I believe that!” I answered, and stared back at him without blinking.  “I guess I wouldn’t want the responsibility.”

But I had an idea that he meant what he said about the many women, and that Miss Patty knew it as well as I did.  She flushed a little, and they went very soon after that.  I stood and watched them until they disappeared in the snow, and I felt lonelier than ever, and sad, although certainly he was better than I had expected to find him.  He was a man, and not a little cub with a body hardly big enough to carry his forefathers’ weaknesses.  But he had a cold eye and a warm mouth, and that sort of man is generally a social success and a matrimonial failure.

It wasn’t until toward night that I remembered I’d been talking to a real prince and I hadn’t once said “your Highness” or “your Excellency” or whatever I should have said.  I had said “You!”

I had hardly closed the door after them when it opened again and Mr. Pierce came in.  He shut the door and, going over to one of the tables, put a package down on it.

“Here’s the stuff you wanted for the spring, Minnie,” he announced.  “I suppose I can’t do anything more than register a protest against it?”

“You needn’t bother doing that,” I answered, “unless it makes you feel better.  Your authority ends at that door.  Inside the spring-house I’m in control.”

(It’s hard to believe, with things as they are, that I once really believed that.  But I did.  It was three full days later that I learned that I’d been mistaken!)

Well, he sat there and looked at nothing while I heated water in my brass kettle over the fire and dissolved the things against Thoburn’s quick eye the next day, and he didn’t say anything.  He had a gift for keeping quiet, Mr. Pierce had.  It got on my nerves after a while.

“Things are doing better,” I remarked, stirring up my mixture.

“Yes,” he said, without moving.

“I suppose they’re happier now they have a doctor?”

“Yes—­no—­I don’t know.  He’s not much of a doctor, you know—­and there don’t seem to be any medical books around.”

“There’s one on the care and feeding of infants in the circulating library,” I said, “and he can have my Anatomy.”