Where Theres a Will | Page 3

father came every winter to Hope Springs
and I couldn't have been more anxious about it if she had been my own
sister.
Well, as I say, it all began the very day the old doctor died. He stamped
out to the spring-house with the morning paper about nine o'clock, and
the wedding seemed to be all off. The paper said the emperor had
definitely refused his consent and had sent the prince, who was his
cousin, for a Japanese cruise, while the Jennings family was going to
Mexico in their private car. The old doctor was indignant, and I
remember how he tramped up and down the spring-house, muttering
that the girl had had a lucky escape, and what did the emperor expect if
beauty and youth and wealth weren't enough. But he calmed down, and
soon he was reading that the papers were predicting an early spring,
and he said we'd better begin to increase our sulphur percentage in the
water.
I hadn't noticed anything strange in his manner, although we'd all
noticed how feeble he was growing, but when he got up to go back to
the sanatorium and I reached him his cane, it seemed to me he avoided
looking at me. He went to the door and then turned and spoke to me
over his shoulder.
"By the way," he remarked, "Mr. Richard will be along in a day or so,
Minnie. You'd better break it to Mrs. Wiggins."
Since the summer before we'd had to break Mr. Dick's coming to Mrs.
Wiggins the housekeeper, owing to his finding her false front where it
had blown out of a window, having been hung up to dry, and his

wearing it to luncheon as whiskers. Mr. Dick was the old doctor's
grandson.
"Humph!" I said, and he turned around and looked square at me.
"He's a good boy at heart, Minnie," he said. "We've had our troubles
with him, you and I, but everything has been quiet lately."
When I didn't say anything he looked discouraged, but he had a fine
way of keeping on until he gained his point, had the old doctor.
"It HAS been quiet, hasn't it?" he demanded.
"I don't know," I said; "I have been deaf since the last explosion!" And
I went down the steps to the spring. I heard the tap of his cane as he
came across the floor, and I knew he was angry.
"Confound you, Minnie," he exclaimed, "if I could get along without
you I'd discharge you this minute."
"And if I paid any attention to your discharging me I'd have been gone
a dozen times in the last year," I retorted. "I'm not objecting to Mr.
Dick coming here, am I? Only don't expect me to burst into song about
it. Shut the door behind you when you go out."
But he didn't go at once. He stood watching me polish glasses and get
the card-tables ready, and I knew he still had something on his mind.
"Minnie," he said at last, "you're a shrewd young woman--maybe more
head than heart, but that's well enough. And with your temper under
control, you're a CAPABLE young woman."
"What has Mr. Dick been up to now?" I asked, growing suspicious.
"Nothing. But I'm an old man, Minnie, a very old man."
"Stuff and nonsense," I exclaimed, alarmed. "You're only seventy.
That's what comes of saying in the advertising that you are eighty--to
show what the springs have done for you. It's enough to make a man

die of senility to have ten years tacked to his age."
"And if," he went on, "if anything happens to me, Minnie, I'm counting
on you to do what you can for the old place. You've been here a good
many years, Minnie."
"Fourteen years I have been ladling out water at this spring," I said,
trying to keep my lips from trembling. "I wouldn't be at home any place
else, unless it would be in an aquarium. But don't ask me to stay here
and help Mr. Dick sell the old place for a summer hotel. For that's what
he'll do."
"He won't sell it," declared the old doctor grimly. "All I want is for you
to promise to stay."
"Oh, I'll stay," I said. "I won't promise to be agreeable, but I'll stay.
Somebody'll have to look after the spring; I reckon Mr. Dick thinks it
comes out of the earth just as we sell it, with the whole pharmacopoeia
in it."
Well, it made the old doctor happier, and I'm not sorry I promised, but
I've got a joint on my right foot that throbs when it is going to rain or I
am going to have bad luck, and it gave a jump then. I might have
known