Suddenly she stopped crying.

“Where is he, anyhow?” she demanded.

“All we are sure of,” Mr. Pierce replied quietly, “is that he is not in the sanatorium.”

She looked at us all closely, but she got nothing from my face.

“Oh, very well,” she said, shrugging her shoulders, “I’ll wait until he shows up.  It doesn’t cost anything.”

Then, with one of her easy changes, she laughed and picked up her muff to go.

“Minnie and I,” she said, “will tend bar here, and in our leisure moments we will pour sulphur water on a bunch of Dicky’s letters that I have, to cool ’em.”  She walked to the door and turned around, smiling.

“Carry fire insurance on ’em all the time,” she finished and went out, leaving us staring at one another!

CHAPTER XVIII

MISS COBB’S BURGLAR

I went to bed early that night.  What with worrying and being alternately chilled by tramping through the snow and roasted as if I was sitting on a volcano with an eruption due, I was about all in.  We’d been obliged to tell Mrs. Sam about the Summers woman, and I had to put hot flannels on her from nine to ten.  She was quieter when I left her, but, as I told Mr. Sam, it was the stillness of despair, not resignation.

I guess it was about four o’clock in the morning when a hand slid over my face, and I sat up and yelled.  The hand covered my mouth at that, and something long and white and very thin beside the bed said:  “Sh!  For heaven’s sake, Minnie!”

It was Miss Cobb!  It was lucky I came to my senses when I did, for her knees gave way under her just then and she doubled up on the floor beside the bed with her face in my comfort.

I lighted a candle and set it on a chair beside the bed and took a good look at her.  She was shaking all over, which wasn’t strange, for I sleep with my window open, and she had a key in her hand.

“Here,” she gasped, holding out the key, “here, Minnie, wake the house and get him, but, oh, Minnie, for heaven’s sake, save my reputation!”

“Get who?” I demanded, for I saw it was her room key.

“I have been coming here for ten years,” she groaned, out of the comfort, “and now, to be bandied about by the cold breath of scandal!”

I shook her by the shoulder

“The cold breath you are raving about is four degrees below zero.  If you can’t tell me what’s the matter I’m going back to bed and cover my feet.”

She got up at that and stood swaying, with her nightgown flapping around her like a tent.

“I have locked a man in my room!” she declared in a terrible voice, and collapsed into the middle of the bed.

Well, I leaned over and tried to tell her she’d made a mistake.  The more I looked at her, with her hair standing straight out over her head, and her cambric nightgown with a high collar and long sleeves, and the hump on her nose where her brother Willie had hit her in childhood with a baseball bat, the surer I was that somebody had made a mistake—­likely the man.