"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 orphan