home.

Miss Yvonne took me up and told me that the nurse was out for the afternoon, and that Monsieur was lying down in Louis's room. So, for the first time since his accident, I actually saw Louis without a lot of other people in the room. We chatted for a while about school matters and what we had all been doing while he was laid up. And Louis told me how much better he was, how he was soon going to be allowed to get up, and that the nurse was going in a few days. After that, we were both quiet for a few moments. It was one of those pauses that sometimes come in conversation, which get so prolonged that you hardly know how to break them. Then, just to end the silence, I asked Louis why Monsieur had insisted on his being in this room, and how inconvenient it must have been for Monsieur. To my surprise, Louis became much excited and said: "I can't think whatever made him do it that day! _I_ didn't want to be here. I'm horribly uncomfortable about it all the time. I _hate_ it! It would have been so much more sensible to have put me in my own room on the ground floor. And, Sue, what do you think?" Here Louis sank his voice to a whisper. "I came to myself one day, out of a sort of stupor that I'd been in, and found him kneeling by the side of the bed and actually _kissing my hand_! I was so astonished and disgusted that I snatched it away, weak as I was. He never said a word, but rose and walked out of the room. What does it all mean?""I'm sure I don't know, Louis," I replied; "but tell me, do you know anything about those portraits that hang on the wall opposite your bed? Why are two covered up, and who is that boy in the middle?"

To my astonishment, Louis seized hold of my arm and whispered: "Sue, Sue, I hate those pictures. I hate that one in the middle. I'm _afraid_ of it! I--"

Before he could say any more we heard Miss Yvonne coming up the stairs to tell me that my time was up and that Louis must rest. And so he couldn't go on.

But why, _why_ does Louis hate the picture of that boy, and why, above all things, is he afraid of it? Was there ever so curious a mystery?

Despite the fact that Sue and Carol boiled with impatience for over a week, conjecturing what it could possibly be that made Louis afraid of the picture in Monsieur's room, they found out nothing new on the subject, for the simple reason that there was never a moment when they again saw him alone. To ask him about it when others were in the room was impossible. Two days after Sue's last visit he was allowed to sit up, and a day or two after that he was 

 Prev. P 36/120 next