"I did come," he explained. "I came twice, and each time we played roulette. I lost all the money I'd had in advance. Honestly," he confessed, "I felt I couldn't afford to come every day."
Miss Patty got up and put the baby rabbits into her sister's big fur muff.
"We are all talking around the question," she said. "Mr. Pierce undertook to manage the sanatorium, and to try to manage it successfully. He can not do that without making some attempt at conciliating the people. It's—it's absurd to antagonize them."
"Exactly," he said coldly. "I was to manage it, and to try to do it successfully. I'm sorry my methods don't meet with the approval of this—er—executive committee. But it might as well be clear that I intend to use my own methods—or none."
Well, what could we do? Miss Patty went out with her head up, and the rest of us stayed and ate humble pie, and after a while he agreed to stay if he wasn't interfered with. He said he and Doctor Barnes had a plan that he thought was a winner—that it would either make or break the place, and he thought it would make it. And by that time we were so meek that we didn't even ask what it was.
Doctor Barnes and Miss Summers were the first to come to the mineral spring that morning. She stopped just inside the door and sniffed.
"Something's dead under the floor," she said.
"If there's anything dead," Doctor Barnes replied, "it's in the center of the earth. That's the sulphur water."
She came in at that, but unwillingly, and sat down with her handkerchief to her nose. Then she saw me.
"Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "What have you done that they put you here?"