Three Sides of Paradise GreenSeaman, Augusta Huiell
General
Three Sides of Paradise Green
Seaman, Augusta Huiell
Diary fiction; Girls -- Juvenile fiction; Mystery fiction; New England -- Juvenile fiction
My idea was that perhaps he had some relatives there and that they
wanted him to come back. But Louis says his uncle has often told him
that he hasn't any relatives living. And if he had, he says there's no
reason why there should be all this secrecy about it. But he can't
understand who the people are with whom his uncle is corresponding.
Carol's opinion was that perhaps Louis was a descendant of some titled
person,--a count or a marquis or something like that,--and that these
people are trying to bring him back to his legal title and estates.
Louis simply hooted at that. He says that his great grandfather was a
plain "monsieur" when he came over here long ago; that he never had been
anything else and didn't want to be. So that Carol's idea was all
nonsense. Carol is always romancing like that, and generally getting
laughed at. Just at this point the Imp came suddenly around the corner
of the veranda and demanded:
"What are you talking about? I warrant dollars to doughnuts it's about
Louis."
That child has a perfectly uncanny way of lighting on just the thing you
don't care to have her know about. She's a veritable mind-reader. None
of us cared at that particular moment to explain what we were
discussing, so no one said a word. Meanwhile the Imp eyed us with a
grin. And before any one could think of something to say that would
change the subject, she exploded this bomb in our midst:
"Louis' Aunt Yvonne has come home. She's having a fit!"
Louis just scooted for his own house as fast as he could. We asked her
how she knew Miss Meadows was having a fit, and she said:
"Because I saw her drive up and get out of the hack and run up the
steps. I had climbed a tree in their side yard to look into an oriole's
nest, and I heard her open the door and call out a lot of things in
French to old Mr. Meadows."
The Imp is terribly quick about picking up languages, and she has teased
Louis into teaching her quite a little French, which he declared to us
she picked up with lightning speed. It makes Carol and me furious
sometimes to feel that she has this advantage over us, for we haven't
come to French yet in high school, and are so busy digging out our Latin
that we haven't either time or interest to learn another language on the
side. Well, it humiliated me to pieces to have to ask her what Miss
Yvonne said, but I swallowed my pride and did so. All the little wretch
answered, as she walked away, was:
"Wouldn't you like to know?"
[Illustration: "Wouldn't you like to know?" she replied, exasperatingly]
We didn't see anything more of Louis to-day, and Carol and I are just
burning up with curiosity. I could shake the Imp till her teeth
chattered!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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