We three have talked of it incessantly,--Carol, the Imp, and I. Somehow the wonder of it never grows any less. That such a thing _could_ happen here, here on little Paradise Green! And yet the Imp says it is no new thing in history for an exiled king to hide himself away in a strange country amid the humblest surroundings. Where _does_ she get all these historical facts, anyway? Even Carol, who is fond of history and reads a lot of it, doesn't know half as much about things as the Imp does. I am changing my opinion of the Imp very much lately. I used to think she was such a scatter-brained, harum-scarum child, without a serious thought in her head. But I guess we really didn't _know_ her then, and misjudged her a lot. But it's Louis, our Louis, who seems to us the strangest, the most impossible thing to believe. Before we heard Monsieur's story we imagined this about him, but half the time we told ourselves it wasn't, it _couldn't_ be true. We _must_ be on the wrong track, we said. Now we know that it is all true, and Louis can never be "our Louis," the friend we've always known, any more. How could he be? To begin with, he's going to be the adopted son of the Marquis de Fenouil (I _hope_ that's the way to spell it!), a great nobleman of France, and go away to France and inherit a title, and probably we'll never see him again as long as we live. In addition, as if that weren't enough, he's not the plain American boy we always thought him, but the great-great-grandson of a king of France. And _we_ know this, even if the rest of the world does not, and can never, never feel on the same footing with him again. Not that that will make any difference, I suppose, if he's to go away from here for good. But it's like losing your brother,--like losing Dave, for instance,--only Dave never has been, especially of late years, as friendly and near to us as Louis has been. We have seen almost nothing of Louis since that day with Monsieur. He has been to Bridgeton every day, spending the time, I'm perfectly certain, with that Page Calvin and his miserable aëroplane. It makes me perfectly sick to think of it, especially since Monsieur has told us everything. By the way, I can't get out of the habit of calling him "Monsieur," but it's just as well, I suppose, because we're not supposed to know he's anything else. Of course Louis doesn't realize what all this means to the old gentleman, but if he only knew that it was fairly breaking his heart, I do believe he'd be willing to give up the dangerous scheme and take to something else. I feel sure Monsieur suspects why he's away at Bridgeton, but he never says a word to us,--just suffers in silence.