“Maybe you think I’m disappointed,” I said, looking hard at the family, who weren’t making any particular pretense at grief, and at the house people standing around the door.  “Maybe you think it’s funny to see an unmarried woman get a set of waistcoat buttons and a medical book.  Well, that set of buttons was the set he bought in London on his wedding trip, and the book’s the one he read himself to sleep with every night for twenty years.  I’m proud to get them.”

Mr. Van Alstyne touched me on the arm.

“Everybody knows how loyal you’ve been, Minnie,” he assured me.  “Now sit down like a good girl and listen to the rest of the will.”

“While I’m up I might as well get something else off my mind,” I said.  “I know what’s in that will, but I hadn’t anything to do with it, Mr. Van Alstyne.  He took advantage of my being laid up with influenza last spring.”

They thought that was funny, but a few minutes later they weren’t so cheerful.  You see the sanatorium was a mighty fine piece of property, with a deer park and golf links.  We’d had plenty of offers to sell it for a summer hotel, but we’d both been dead against it.  That was one of the reasons for the will.

The whole estate was left to Dicky Carter, who hadn’t been able to come, owing to his being laid up with an attack of mumps.  The family sat up and nodded at one another, or held up its hands, but when they heard there was a condition they breathed easier.

Beginning with one week after the reading of the will—­and not a day later—­Mr. Dick was to take charge of the sanatorium and to stay there for two months without a day off.  If at the end of that time the place was being successfully conducted and could show that it hadn’t lost money, the entire property became his for keeps.  If he failed it was to be sold and the money given to charity.

You would have to know Richard Carter to understand the excitement the will caused.  Most of us, I reckon, like the sort of person we’ve never dared to be ourselves.  The old doctor had gone to bed at ten o’clock all his life and got up at seven, and so he had a sneaking fondness for the one particular grandson who often didn’t go to bed at all.  Twice to my knowledge when he was in his teens did Dicky Carter run away from school, and twice his grandfather kept him for a week hidden in the shelter-house on the golf links.  Naturally when Mr. Van Alstyne and I had to hide him again, which is further on in the story, he went to the old shelter-house like a dog to its kennel, only this time—­but that’s ahead, too.

Well, the family went back to town in a buzz of indignation, and I carried my waistcoat buttons and my Anatomy out to the spring-house and had a good cry.  There was a man named Thoburn who was crazy for the property as a summer hotel, and every time I shut my eyes I could see “Thoburn House” over the veranda and children sailing paper boats in the mineral spring.