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 woul