He watched her up the stairs and then turned and walked to the fire, with his hands in his pockets and his head down.

I closed the news stand and he came over just as I was hanging up the cigar-case key for Amanda King in the morning.  He reached up and took the key off its nail.

“I’ll keep that,” he said.  “It’s no tobacco after this, Minnie.”

“You can’t keep them here, then,” I retorted.  “They’ve got to smoke; it’s the only work they do.”

“We’ll see,” he said quietly.  “And—­oh, yes, Minnie, now that we shall not be using the mineral spring—­”

“Not use the mineral spring!” I repeated, stupefied.

“Certainly not!” he said.  “This is a drugless sanatorium, Minnie, from now on.  That’s part of the theory—­no drugs.”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” I snapped, “theory or no theory, you’ve got to have drugs.  No theory that I ever heard of is going to cure Mr. Moody’s indigestion and Miss Cobb’s neuralgia.”

“They won’t have indigestion and neuralgia.”

“Or Amanda King’s toothache.”

“We won’t have Amanda King.”

He put his elbow on the stand and smiled at me.

“Listen, Minnie,” he said.  “If you hadn’t been wasting your abilities in the mineral spring, I’d be sorry to close it.  But there will be plenty for you to do.  Don’t you know that the day of the medicine-closet in the bath-room and the department-store patent-remedy counter is over?  We’ve got sanatoriums now instead of family doctors.  In other words, we put in good sanitation systems and don’t need the plumber and his repair kit.”

“The pharmacy?” I said between my teeth.

“Closed also.  No medicine, Minnie.  That’s our slogan.  This is the day of prophylaxis.  The doctors have taken a step in the right direction and are giving fewer drugs.  Christian Science has abolished drugs and established the healer.  We simply abolish the healer.”

“If we’re not going to use the spring-house, we might have saved the expense of the new roof in the fall,” I said bitterly.

“Not at all.  For two hours or so a day the spring-house will be a rest-house—­windows wide open and God’s good air penetrating to fastnesses it never knew before.”

“The spring will freeze!”

“Exactly.  My only regret is that it is too small to skate on.  But they’ll have the ice pond.”

“When I see Mr. Moody skating on the ice pond,” I said sarcastically, “I’ll see Mrs. Moody dead with the shock on the bank.”

“Not at all,” he replied calmly.  “You’ll see her skating, too.”  And with that he went to bed.

CHAPTER XXIV

LIKE DUCKS TO WATER

They took to it like ducks take to water.  Not, of course, that they didn’t kick about making their own beds and having military discipline generally.  They complained a lot, but when after three days went by with the railroad running as much on schedule as it ever does, they were all still there, and Mr. Jennings had limped out and spent a half-hour at the wood-pile with his gouty foot on a cushion, I saw it was a success.