Where Theres a Will | Page 4

there was trouble ahead.

CHAPTER II
MISS PATTY ARRIVES
It was pretty quiet in the spring-house that day after the old doctor left.
It had started to snow and only the regulars came out. What with the
old doctor talking about dying, and Miss Patty Jennings gone to
Mexico, when I'd been looking forward to her and her cantankerous old
father coming to Hope Springs for February, as they mostly did, I was
depressed all day. I got to the point where Mr. Moody feeding nickels
into the slot-machine with one hand and eating zwieback with the other

made me nervous. After a while he went to sleep over it, and when he
had slipped a nickel in his mouth and tried to put the zwieback in the
machine he muttered something and went up to the house.
I was glad to be alone. I drew a chair in front of the fire and wondered
what I would do if the old doctor died, and what a fool I'd been not to
be a school-teacher, which is what I studied for.
I was thinking to myself bitterly that all that my experience in the
spring fitted me for was to be a mermaid, when I heard something
running down the path, and it turned out to be Tillie, the diet cook.
She slammed the door behind her and threw the Finleyville evening
paper at me.
"There!" she said, "I've won a cake of toilet soap from Bath-house
Mike. The emperor's consented."
"Nonsense!" I snapped, and snatched the paper. Tillie was right; the
emperor HAD! I sat down and read it through, and there was Miss
Patty's picture in an oval and the prince's in another, with a turned-up
mustache and his hand on the handle of his sword, and between them
both was the Austrian emperor. Tillie came and looked over my
shoulder.
"I'm not keen on the mustache," she said, "but the sword's
beautiful--and, oh, Minnie, isn't he aristocratic? Look at his nose!"
But I'm not one to make up my mind in a hurry, and I'd heard enough
talk about foreign marriages in the years I'd been dipping out mineral
water to make me a skeptic, so to speak.
"I'm not so sure," I said slowly. "You can't tell anything by that kind of
a picture. If he was even standing beside a chair I could get a line on
him. He may be only four feet high."
"Then Miss Jennings wouldn't love him," declared Tillie. "How do you
reckon he makes his mustache point up like that?"

"What's love got to do with it?" I demanded. "Don't be a fool, Tillie. It
takes more than two people's pictures in a newspaper with a red heart
around them and an overweight cupid above to make a love-match.
Love's a word that's used to cover a good many sins and to excuse them
all."
"She isn't that kind," said Tillie. "She's--she's as sweet as she's beautiful,
and you're as excited as I am, Minnie Waters, and if you're not, what
have you got the drinking glass she used last winter put on the top shelf
out of reach for?" She went to the door and slammed it open. "Thank
heaven I'm not a dried-up old maid," she called back over her shoulder,
"and when you're through hugging that paper you can send it up to the
house."
Well, I sat there and thought it over, Miss Patty, or Miss Patricia, being,
so to speak, a friend of mine. They'd come to the Springs every winter
for years. Many a time she'd slipped away from her governess and
come down to the spring-house for a chat with me, and we'd make
pop-corn together by my open fire, and talk about love and clothes, and
even the tariff, Miss Patty being for protection, which was natural,
seeing that was the way her father made his money, and I for free trade,
especially in the winter when my tips fall off considerable.
And when she was younger she would sit back from the fire, with the
corn-popper on her lap and her cheeks as red as cranberries, and say: "I
DON'T know why I tell you all these things, Minnie, but Aunt
Honoria's funny, and I can't talk to Dorothy; she's too young, you know.
Well, HE said--" only every winter it was a different "he."
In my wash-stand drawer I'd kept all the clippings about her coming out
and the winter she spent in Washington and was supposed to be
engaged to the president's son, and the magazine article that told how
Mr. Jennings had got his money by robbing widows and orphans, and
showed the little frame house where Miss Patty was born--as if she's
had anything to do with it.