cannot imagine what has come over Monsieur,--Carol, the Imp, and myself, I mean. Why is he waiting? Why doesn't he tell Louis, as he said would have to? What does all this delay mean?But if everything remains outwardly the same, it is not so with the way we three _feel_ about things. I don't know if I can explain the strange change that has come over our feelings toward Louis and Monsieur and all that concerns them,--especially toward Louis. All our lives he has been just 'Louis Durant,' the nice boy who lived across the Green, who played with us from the time we were babies and studied with us in the same classes in school, who was just like our brother, except that he didn't live in the same house. We have always thought of him in the same way that we do of Dave. Now, however, everything is different. He _isn't_ 'Louis Durant' any more. He's some strange, unknown, long-way-off person, whose ancestors were monarchs of one of the greatest countries on earth, and who might have been a king himself, if things had gone a little differently. I simply _can't_ feel near to, and well-acquainted with, a person like that. Carol says she can't, either, and the Imp admits that she's felt so a good while longer than we have.It seems as if _our_ Louis had been taken away forever and a strange, unapproachable person had been put in his place. Not that Louis _himself_ acts any differently. He's exactly the same as ever, of course, and he's said a dozen times in the course of the last week:"What's come over you girls, anyway? You're all the time gazing at me with eyes as big as dinner-plates, and you act so queerly and are so absent-minded that I don't know you! Has a realization of the fact that I hope some day to be a full-fledged aviator had such a doleful effect on you as all that? You haven't been the same since that day. I wish to goodness that I'd never told you, if you're going to take it in this silly way."Of course we try to assure him that nothing at all is the matter, but it doesn't work very well.We three have talked a number of times about whether we ought to breathe a word of what we suspect to Louis, but the Imp says positively, "No." If he is to know, she says, he must learn it from Monsieur and from no other. In fact, by rights she ought not to have let us into the secret, and she wouldn't have done so, except that she thought there would be no reason why she shouldn't after Monsieur had told Louis. Since he apparently hasn't told him anything yet, it is our duty to keep the secret. I guess she must be right. _I_ wouldn't want to be the one to tell Louis, anyway.Our final exams for this year are coming in a week or so, and we are all "cramming" hard, so I probably won't have a chance to think of much else for some time to come.
June 3, 1914. 

 Prev. P 64/120 next