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 today, and Carol and I are just burning up with curiosity. I could shake the Imp till her teeth chattered!

There was a cosy group gathered about the open fire in the Birdseys' big, comfortable, and not too tidy living-room. At a large center table, drawn close to the blaze, sat Carol and Sue, scribbling away for dear life in two large, fat notebooks and covering the table with many trial sheets of mathematical figuring. They were exact opposites in appearance. Sue was tall and slim to the 

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