“Well,” I said, “they can’t have electric light sent up in boxes and labeled ‘books,’ but they can get liquor that way.”

He whistled, and then he laughed.

“Then we’ll not have any books,” he said.  “I guess they can manage.  ’My only books were woman’s looks—­’” and then he saw the ball of paper on the floor and his expression changed.  He walked over and picked it up, smoothing it out on the palm of his hand.

After a minute he looked up at me.

“I haven’t been to the shelter-house to-day.  They are all right?”

“They’re nervous.  With everybody walking these days they daren’t venture a nose out of doors.”

He was still holding the clipping.

“And—­Miss Jennings!” he said.  “She—­I think she looks better.”

“Her father’s in a better humor for one thing—­says Abraham Lincoln split logs, and that it beats massage.”

I had been standing in the doorway, but he took me by the arm and drew me into the room.

“I wish you’d sit down for about ten minutes, Minnie,” he said.  “I guess every fellow has a time when he’s got to tell his troubles to some good woman—­not but that you know mine already.  You’re as shrewd as you are kind.”

I sat down on the edge of a chair.  For all I had had so much to do with the sanatorium, I never forgot that I was only the spring-house girl.  He threw himself back in his easy chair, with the candle behind him on the table and his arms above his head.

“It’s like this, Minnie,” he said.  “Mr. Jennings likes the new order of things and—­he’s going to stay.”

I nodded.

“And I like it here.  I want to stay.  It’s the one thing I’ve found that I think I can do.  It isn’t what I’ve dreamed of, but it’s worth while.  To anchor the derelicts of humanity in a sort of repair dock here, and scrape the barnacles off their dispositions, and send them out shipshape again, surely that’s something.  And I can do it.”

I nodded again.

“But if the Jenningses stay—­” he looked at me.  “Minnie, in heaven’s name, what am I going to do if she stays?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Pierce,” I said.  “I couldn’t sleep last night for thinking about it.”

He smoothed out the paper and looked at it again, but I think he scarcely saw it.

“The situation is humorous,” he said, “only my sense of humor seems to have died.  She doesn’t know I exist, except to invent new and troublesome regulations for her annoyance.  She is very sweet when she meets me, but only because I am helping her to have her own way.  And I—­my God, Minnie, I sit in the office and listen for her step outside!”

He moved a little and held out the paper in the candle-light.

“‘It will please Americans to know,’” he read, “’that with the exception of the Venetian lace robe sent by the bridegroom’s mother, all of Miss Patricia Jennings’ elaborate trousseau is being made in America.