“Good,” she said, smiling.  “I’m something fine at that myself.  Suppose I stay here and help.  If I watch that line of knitting women I’ll be crotcheting Arabella’s wool in my sleep to-night.”

Well, she was too cheerful to be angry with.  So she stayed around for a while, and it was amazing how much tobacco I sold that evening.  Men who usually bought tobies bought the best cigars, and when Mr. Jennings came up, scowling, and I handed him the brand he’d smoked for years, she took one, clipped the end of it as neat as a finger nail and gave it to him, holding up the lighter.

“I’m not going to smoke yet, young woman,” he said, glaring at her.  But she only smiled.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “I’ve been waiting hungrily until some discriminating smoker would buy one of those and light it.  I love the aroma.”

And he stood there for thirty minutes, standing mostly on one foot on account of the gouty one, puffing like a locomotive, with her sniffing at the aroma and telling him how lonely she felt with no friends around and just recovering from a severe illness.

At eight o’clock he had Mrs. Hutchins bring him his fur-lined coat and he and Miss Julia took Arabella, the dog, for a walk on the veranda!

The rest of the evening was quiet, and I needed it.  Miss Patty and Mr. von Inwald talked by the fire and I think he told her something—­not all—­of the scene in the spring-house.  For she passed Mr. Pierce at the foot of the stairs on her way up for the night and she pretended not to see him.  He stood there looking up after her with his mouth set, and at the turn she glanced down and caught his eye.  I thought she flushed, but I wasn’t sure, and at that minute Senator Biggs bought three twenty-five-cent cigars and told me to keep the change from a dollar.  I was so surprised at the alteration in him that I forgot Miss Patty entirely.

About twelve o’clock, just after I went to my room, somebody knocked at the door.  When I opened, the new doctor was standing in the hall.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said, “but nobody seems to know where the pharmacy clerk is and I’ll have to get some medicine.”

“If I’d had my way, we’d have had a bell on that pharmacy clerk long ago,” I snapped, getting my keys.  “Who’s sick?”

“The big man,” he replied.  “Biggs is his name, I think, a senator or something.”

I was leading the way to the stairs, but I stopped.  “I might have known it,” I said.  “He hasn’t been natural all evening.  What’s the matter with him?  Too much fast?”

“Fast!” He laughed.  “Too much feast!  He’s got as pretty a case of indigestion as I’ve seen for some time.  He’s giving a demonstration that’s almost theatrical.”

Well, he insisted it was indigestion, although I argued that it wasn’t possible, and he wanted ipecac.

“I haven’t seen a pharmacopoeia for so long that I wouldn’t know one if I met it,” he declared, “but I’ve got a system of mnemonics that never fails.  Ipecac and colic both end with ’c’—­I’ll never forget that conjunction.  It was pounded in and poured in in my early youth.”