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 wouldn't be at home any place
else, unless it would be in an aquarium. But don't ask me to stay here
and help Mr. Dick sell the old place for a summer hotel. For that's what
he'll do."

"He won't sell it," declared the old doctor grimly. "All I want is for
you to promise to stay."

"Oh, I'll stay," I said. "I won't promise to be agreeable, but I'll
stay. Somebody'll have to look after the spring; I reckon Mr. Dick
thinks it comes out of the earth just as we sell it, with the whole
pharmacopoeia in it."

Well, it made the old doctor happier, and I'm not sorry I promised, but