Where Theres a Will | Page 5

inside the door.
"YOU, TOO," she said. "And we've come all this distance to get away from just that."
"Well, I shan't talk about it," I replied, not holding out my hand, for with her, so to speak, next door to being a princess--but she leaned right over and kissed me. I could hardly believe it.
"Why won't you talk about it?" she insisted, catching me by the shoulders and holding me off. "Minnie, your eyes are as red as your hair!"
"I don't approve of it," I said. "You might as well know it now as later, Miss Patty. I don't believe in mixed marriages. I had a cousin that married a Jew, and what with him making the children promise to be good on the Talmud and her trying to raise them with the Bible, the poor things is that mixed up that it's pitiful."
She got a little red at that, but she sat down and took up the clipping.
"He's much better looking than that, Minnie," she said soberly, "and he's a good Catholic. But if that's the way you feel we'll not talk about it. I've had enough trouble at home as it is."
"I guess from that your father isn't crazy about it," I remarked, getting her a glass of spring water. The papers had been full of how Mr. Jennings had forbidden the prince the house when he had been in America the summer before.
"Certainly he's crazy about it--almost insane!" she said, and smiled at me in her old way over the top of the glass. Then she put down the glass and came over to me. "Minnie, Minnie," she said, "if you only knew how I've wanted to get away from the newspapers and the gossips and come to this smelly little spring-house and talk things over with a red-haired, sharp-tongued, mean-dispositioned spring-house girl--!"
And with that I began to blubber, and she came into my arms like a baby.
"You're all I've got," I declared, over and over, "and you're going to live in a country where they harness women with dogs, and you'll never hear an English word from morning to night."
"Stuff!" She gave me a little shake. "He speaks as good English as I do. And now we're going to stop talking about him--you're worse than the newspapers." She took off her things and going into my closet began to rummage for the pop-corn. "Oh, how glad I am to get away," she sang out to me. "We're supposed to have gone to Mexico; even Dorothy doesn't know. Where's the pop-corner or the corn-popper or whatever you call it?"
She was as happy to have escaped the reporters and the people she knew as a child, and she sat down on the floor in front of the fire and began to shell the corn into the popper, as if she'd done it only the day before.
"I guess you're safe enough here," I said. "It's always slack in January--only a few chronics and the Saturday-to-Monday husbands, except a drummer now and then who drives up from Finleyville. It's too early for drooping society buds, and the chronic livers don't get around until late March, after the banquet season closes. It will be pretty quiet for a while."
And at that minute the door was flung open, and Bath-house Mike staggered in.
"The old doctor!" he gasped. "He's dead, Miss Minnie--died just now in the hot room in the bathhouse! One minute he was givin' me the divil for something or other, and the next--I thought he was asleep."
Something that had been heavy in my breast all afternoon suddenly seemed to burst and made me feel faint all over. But I didn't lose my head.
"Does anybody know yet?" I asked quickly. He shook his head.
"Then he didn't die in the bath-house, Mike," I said firmly. "He died in his bed, and you know it. If it gets out that he died in the hot room I'll have the coroner on you."
Miss Patty was standing by the railing of the spring. I got my shawl and started out after Mike, and she followed.
"If the guests ever get hold of this they'll stampede. Start any excitement in a sanatorium," I said, "and one and all they'll dip their thermometers in hot water and swear they've got fever!"
And we hurried to the house together.

CHAPTER III
A WILL
Well, we got the poor old doctor moved back to his room, and had one of the chambermaids find him there, and I wired to Mrs. Van Alstyne, who was Mr. Dicky Carter's sister, and who was on her honeymoon in South Carolina. The Van Alstynes came back at once, in very bad tempers, and we had the funeral from the preacher's house in Finleyville so as not to harrow up the sanatorium people any more than necessary. Even as it