the spring to have
his glass refilled during his dummy hand, as if he'd grown up in
the place. The old doctor used to say my memory was an asset to the
sanatorium.

He depended on me a good bit--the old doctor did--and that winter he was
pretty feeble. (He was only seventy, but he'd got in the habit of making
it eighty to show that the mineral water kept him young. Finally he got
to BEING eighty, from thinking it, and he died of senility in the end.)

He was in the habit of coming to the spring-house every day to get his
morning glass of water and read the papers. For a good many years it had
been his custom to sit there, in the winter by the wood fire and in the
summer just inside the open door, and to read off the headings aloud
while I cleaned around the spring and polished glasses.

"I see the president is going fishing, Minnie," he'd say, or "Airbrake
is up to 133; I wish I'd bought it that time I dreamed about it. It was
you who persuaded me not to, Minnie."

And all that winter, with the papers full of rumors that Miss
Patty Jennings was going to marry a prince, we'd followed it by the
spring-house fire, the old doctor and I, getting angry at the Austrian
emperor for opposing it when we knew how much too good Miss Patty was
for any foreigner, and then getting nervous and fussed when we read that
the prince's mother was in favor of the match and it might go through.
Miss Patty and her father came every winter to Hope Springs and I
couldn't have been more anxious about it if she had been my own sister.

Well, as I say, it all began the very day the old doctor died. He
stamped out to the spring-house with the morning paper about nine
o'clock, and the wedding seemed to be all off. The paper said the
emperor had definitely refused his consent and had sent the prince, who
was his cousin, for a Japanese cruise, while the Jennings family was
going to Mexico in their private car. The old doctor was indignant, and
I remember how he tramped up and down the spring-house, muttering that
the girl had had a lucky escape, and what did the emperor expect if
beauty and youth and wealth weren't enough. But he calmed down, and soon
he was reading that the papers were predicting an early spring, and he
said we'd better begin to increase our sulphur percentage in the water.

I hadn't noticed anything strange in his manner, although we'd all
noticed how feeble he was growing, but when he got up to go back to
the sanatorium and I