he door into her sitting-room--Mrs. Hutchins' room opened off
it--and then she came over and put her hand on my arm.

"Will you sit down and try to tell me just what you mean?" she said.
"How can my sister and her--her wretch of a husband have come last night
at midnight when I saw Mr. Carter myself not later than ten o'clock?"

Well, I had to tell her then about who Mr. Pierce was and why I had
to get him, and she understood almost at once. She was the most
understanding girl I ever met. She saw at once what Mr. Sam wouldn't
have known in a thousand years--that I wanted to save the old place not
to keep my position--but because I'd been there so long, and my father
before me, and had helped to make it what it was and all that. And
she stood there in her nightgown--she who was almost a princess--and
listened to me, and patted me on the shoulder when I broke down, telling
her about Thoburn and the summer hotel.

"But here I am," I finished, "telling you about my troubles and
forgetting what I came for. You'll have to go out to the shelter-house,
Miss Patty. And I guess you're expected to fix it up with your father."

She stopped unfastening her long braids of hair.

"Certainly I'll go to the shelter-house," she said, "and I'll shake a
little sense into Dorothy Jennings--the abominable little idiot! But
they needn't think I'm going to help them with father; I wouldn't if I
could, and I can't. He won't speak to me. I'm in disgrace, Minnie." She
gave her hair a shake, twisted it into a rope and then a knot, and
stuck a pin in it. It was lovely: I wish Miss Cobb could have seen her.
"You've known father for years, Minnie: have you ever known him to be
so--so--"

"Devilish" was the word she meant, but I finished for her.

"Unreasonable?" I said. "Well, once before when you were a little girl,
he put his cane through a window in the spring-house, because he thought
it needed air. The spring-house, of course, not the cane."

"Exactly," she said, looking around the room, "and now he's putting a
cane through every plan I have made. Do you see my heavy boots?"

"It's like this," I remarked, bringing the boots from outside the door,
"if he's swallowed the prince and is choking on the settlement question
he might as well get over it. All those foreigners expect pay for taking
a wife. Didn't the chef here want to marry Tillie, the diet cook, and
didn't he want her to turn over the three hundred dollars she had in the
bank, a