December 1, 1913. I haven't written a thing in this journal for over a week, for a number of reasons. In the first place, I'd made up my mind not to write till I had something worth writing about. In the second place, we've been having some exams at school that took a lot of work to prepare for. Third, Thanksgiving holidays came along, and we were all pretty busy and had a lot of engagements. Altogether, I haven't had a minute till now—and something has happened that's rather interesting to write about.

Carol is ever so much better at this journal business than I am. She writes nearly every other day. But then, she doesn't mind writing about all the little ordinary occurrences,—the things she does about the housework and her studies and so on. But I simply can't do it. If I can't tell about something a little out of the ordinary, I won't write at all. And as nothing besides the usual ever happens in either one of our two households (or at school or in the village!), I find myself turning more and more to Louis and his affairs for interest.

It's strange (I've heard other people speak of the same thing, too) that when you once get to thinking about a certain thing, all sorts of other ideas and events connected with it will suddenly begin to appear. I never gave a thought to Louis and his affairs before I began this journal. He has always lived here, and we've always known him and never thought there was anything strange about his folks. But now so many queer little things have happened and so many strange ideas have come to us (Carol and myself, I mean) about that house across the Green that it seems as if there must be some mystery right near our commonplace lives after all.

Before I tell what happened, however, I must remark that the Imp has been particularly exasperating lately. She got wind somehow or other (at first we couldn't think how) that Carol and I are keeping journals. Later I discovered that it was because Carol had carelessly left hers on the desk in our den, and had forgotten to padlock the door. Carol is so thoughtless at times, because she gets to going about with "her head in the clouds," as her Aunt Agatha says, and doesn't remember half the things she ought to do. It's generally when she's thinking up some verses. Carol does compose very pretty verses. Miss Cullingford has praised them highly. But she's always awfully absent-minded when she's thinking about them.

Well, the way we learned that the Imp had discovered our journals was by a large sheet of paper pinned to Carol's barn-door. This was written on it:

November 29. How these precious autumn days fly by! Each one is like a polished jewel. I made my bed and dusted my room at eight A. M. Then I composed a sweet little poem on "Feeding the Pigs." After that I slept in the hammock on the porch till lunchtime. The days are all too short for these many duties!

Of course we were furious. Carol confessed to me that she had left her journal open on the desk in the den, and the last entry was awfully like what that little wretch had written, only Carol had spoken of composing a poem on "Feeding the Pigeons." She had slept on the porch all morning, because it was a lovely mild day and I was away with Mother at a luncheon in Bridgeton. But she hadn't mentioned this in her journal.

It is perfectly useless to argue with the Imp, or to scold or reason with her. She can go you one better every single time. We concluded that the best thing to do was ignore the incident entirely. So we left the paper hanging on the barn-door till the wind blew it away. A course of action like that makes the Imp madder than if you got purple in the face with fury. I've advised Carol not to leave her journal in the den any more, but to keep it in her room, and she says she will.

All this, however, isn't telling what happened to Louis. He told us about it this afternoon while we were resting on our veranda after a hot session of pitching the basketball about. After a while we just had to sit down and get our breath, and the Imp strolled off by herself somewhere. It was then that Louis told us the strange thing that happened yesterday.

It seems that his Aunt Yvonne has gone to New York on a visit for a few days, and he has been alone with his Uncle John and the servant. Yesterday afternoon, about five o'clock, a boy rode up from the village on a bicycle with a telegram for his uncle. The old gentleman opened it, but couldn't read it because he had mislaid his glasses. So he got Louis to read it to him. Louis says the thing was a cablegram from some place in France—he can't remember the name—and that it was the queerest message. It ran like this:

Time almost ripe. Have you the necessary papers? Sail next month.

When his uncle heard this he became terribly excited and began to walk up and down the room very fast. But when Louis asked him what it all meant, all he would say was:

"It is not for you to inquire or for me to explain just yet, Monsieur!" Louis says his uncle often calls him "monsieur," and he can't understand why. He thinks it's generally when the old gentleman forgets himself or is excited. But it makes Louis feel very queer.

After that his uncle wouldn't say anything more, but Louis says he began to rummage around through all his letters and papers, and looked through all his books and in all the closets, evidently hunting for something he couldn't find. And the more he hunted, the more nervous and excitable he grew. Every once in a while he would exclaim, "Ah, why is not that Yvonne here?" By bedtime he was pretty well worked up, for it was evident that he couldn't find what he was searching for. Louis tried and tried to get him to explain and let him help in the hunt. But the old gentleman would only mutter, "No, no! That cannot be!" Louis says he doesn't think his uncle slept all night, because he heard him rummaging about in all sorts of places till nearly morning. To-day he seems terribly used up. He just sits in his chair by the window, staring out and watching for his daughter to come. Louis says he had to go down to the village at eight o'clock last night with a telegram, telling his Aunt Yvonne to come home at once.

How mysterious it all sounds! Louis declares he can't imagine what it means, and it makes him very uneasy, because he is almost certain that it is something concerning himself. He says he sometimes thinks his uncle is planning to send him to France before he gets much older, to complete his studies there and to become a French citizen, and he doesn't want to go.

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?"

"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!

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 note-books and covering the table with many trial sheets of mathematical figuring. They were exact opposites in appearance. Sue was tall and slim to the point of angularity. She had dark eyes, and her dark hair was coiled heavily about her head. Carol was short and plump, with dreamy blue eyes and wavy auburn hair that still hung in a thick braid.

On the davenport, curled up like a kitten in one corner, sat the Imp, or "Bobs," as she was generally called,—her chin propped in her hands, a book balanced against her knees. In sharp contrast to the other two girls was her tiny body and dark, straight hair, and the big blue eyes that could at one moment gaze with liquid, angelic candor, and at the next snap with impish mischief. There was mischief in them at the moment, as she stared reflectively at the two girls bent over the table. Unaware of her gaze, they scribbled on, comparing notes at intervals.

"Do you get the answer 4ab(ab+2bm) ½ to your third problem?" presently inquired Sue, without looking up.

"No, I don't!" moaned Carol in depressed tones, pushing aside her work and running her fingers through her hair. "I don't get anything at all."

"Well, don't worry. Let's see what's wrong. Hand over your work and I'll compare it with mine," said her companion soothingly. She dragged Carol's note-book toward her and compared it with her own.

"Oh, I see what you've done!" she exclaimed in a moment. "In the first equation you didn't put down—"

At this instant the Imp, whose eyes had been smoldering with suppressed mischief, yawned loudly, stretched herself, and remarked with apparent irrelevance:

"It's a long day when you don't go to school, isn't it?"

Both girls sat up with a jerk and surveyed her sternly.

"Do you mean to say that you haven't been to school to-day?" they demanded in a breath, and Sue added, "I'd like to know why not."

"I had a bad headache this morning, Susan," explained the Imp sweetly. "Mother let me stay home. I was all right by two o'clock, though. Louis and I had a game of basketball before it began to rain."

Her companions glanced at each other with a meaning expression, none of which was lost on the Imp. With a grin of satisfaction, she proceeded:

"His aunt called him in just before we finished, and he didn't come out again."

With a visible effort, Sue inquired:

"Did he say why he wasn't at school to-day? We thought it rather queer when he didn't come, but perhaps, after the strange thing that happened yesterday—"

This was precisely the trap into which the Imp had planned that they should fall.

"I didn't ask him," she remarked, with exasperating calm.

"No doubt you didn't," retorted Carol heatedly, "but perhaps he told you without being asked."

"Perhaps he did," returned the Imp, "and perhaps he told me a lot more. However, I must say bye-bye for the present. I've got to go and study my lessons somewhere where I won't be disturbed!"

She scrambled down and sailed out of the room, waving airily to them from the doorway.

"Isn't she simply maddening!" exclaimed Sue. "The idea of saying she had to go and study! I never knew her to study a thing in my life. She seems to know her lessons by instinct."

"But what do you suppose Louis told her?" mused Carol.

"Not much, or I miss my guess," returned Sue. "She's only trying to tease us. But it is strange that he stayed home to-day. Something serious must be the matter. He hasn't missed a day this term before."

"But if it was serious," argued Carol, "why should he be out playing with the Imp?"

At this moment the door opened and a tall, slender boy of seventeen or eighteen strolled in, his hands in his overcoat pockets, his cheeks and overcoat still wet with the driving rain.

"Hello, girls!" he remarked, warming his hands by the blaze of the open fire.

"Hello, Dave!" they replied. "Where did you come from?"

"Been over to Louis's. Queer thing about it, too," he commented, dropping down on the vacant davenport.

"What?" they gasped in breathless chorus.

He looked at them inquiringly.

"Why all the astonishment on your part?" he demanded. "What do you know about it, anyway?"

"Oh, a lot of queer things seem to be happening to Louis lately," explained Carol. "But go on! Tell us all about it."

"Well, Father didn't need me to-night, so I thought I'd stroll over to Louis's and see if he wanted a little session with that higher mathematics course that he and I are working at together on our own hook. I rang at the front door several times, but didn't get any response. Then I tried the back door, with no better luck. There was a light in the parlor, too, but, on glancing in the window, I saw that no one was there. Mr. Meadows had evidently gone to bed. I had just started out to the barn, thinking that Louis might be in his work-room there, when I noticed a light in one of the cellar windows. I then felt sure that Louis was down there, clearing up or getting vegetables for his aunt, so I went over and peeped in, thinking to give him a surprise. It was I who got the surprise, though!"

"What did you see?" demanded Sue in an awestricken whisper.

"Funniest sight ever! There Miss Yvonne was standing with a lamp in her hand, and Louis, with a pickaxe and shovel, had pried out one of the stones in the foundation near the big chimney and was poking around in the hole he'd made, while Miss Yvonne stared into it, those big black eyes of hers as round as saucers. While I was still looking, she shook her head, motioned Louis to put the stone back, and pointed to another a little farther along. I began to feel as if I'd lit on something that wasn't any business of mine, so instead of knocking on the window as I'd intended, I just got up and came away. Guess they must be hunting for buried treasure or something. Never knew they suspected the presence of any in their old ranch. Louis didn't look as if he were particularly enjoying the job, however."

"Well, that's about all," he ended, suddenly remembering what, in the excitement of the little adventure, he had momentarily forgotten,—his superior pose toward all girls and toward his sister in particular. Then he vanished swiftly out of the room, lest they be moved to ask him any further questions and lest he be tempted to answer.

After he had gone, Sue and Carol stared at each other in a maze of excited conjecture.

"What do you make of it?" sighed Carol.

"I don't make anything of it," declared Sue. "It sounds too mysterious for words. But I know this much. They weren't hunting for buried treasure. It's for papers of some kind. I'm sure of it. But what can they be about, and why should they be in the cellar?"

But Carol was off on another tack.

"At last we'll have something worth while to write about in our journals," she remarked. "Don't you ever think again, Susette Birdsey, that nothing exciting happens in our lives! I can fill up three or four pages about it."

Her companion assented absently.

"Do you realize," she suddenly exclaimed, "that here's where we got way ahead of the Imp? Serves her right for playing us such a mean trick and going out of the room. I call it a piece of downright luck!"