The Imp is my sister. She's twelve years old and a perfect nuisance. Carol and I have named her "The Imp" because she acts just like one. She likes to trot around with us all the time, but we won't have it. It's impossible to have a child of twelve continually hanging on to girls of fifteen or sixteen, and Carol and I simply won't stand it. The Imp is fearfully miffed about this and spends her time thinking up revengeful things to do to us. She makes our lives perfectly miserable sometimes, though we wouldn't let her know it for the world.
Carol's house is on the River Road side of the Green. She lives there with just her mother and her Aunt Agatha. The Fayres are distant relatives of ours, so Carol and I are really cousins. Their house is one of the old style, a real New England farmhouse, and they have a glorious big barn in the back, where we've all played ever since we were babies. One little room off the haymow Carol and I have fixed up as our private den and study. We keep our books and our fancywork there, and her mother gave us an old desk where we do our school work. We always keep the den locked with a padlock, because the Imp would like to get in and rummage around. She's as mad as a hatter because she can't. She threatens to climb in the window sometime, but I don't believe she could possibly. If she did, she'd probably break her neck.
Carol is fifteen years old, and I'm sixteen. Her name is really Caroline, but she hates it and wants to be called "Carol" instead. She says it's so much prettier. And mine is even worse—Susan! Could anything be more dreadful? I've insisted on being called "Susette," which at least is a prettier French form. But no one except Carol will ever call me that. Every one calls me either "Susie" or "Sue," that is, all but the Imp. She, of course, knowing how much I detest it, will say nothing but "So-o-san" on all occasions. Carol she addresses by the horrible nickname of "Cad." Why are some children so irritating, I wonder? The infuriating part is that the Imp's own name is really lovely—Helen Roberta—and she knows it, little torment that she is!
Well, I haven't yet told about the third house on the Green, so now I come to that. It's the one on the Cranberry Bog Road side. It's by far the most interesting of the three,—a long, rambling colonial farmhouse, built, they say, way back in seventeen hundred and something. It has the most fascinating additions in all directions from the main part, and queer little back stairways and old slave quarters, and I don't know what else. But the people who live in it are the interesting part.
To begin with, there's Louis. His whole name is Louis Charles Durant. He is seventeen and goes to high school in Bridgeton with us. We have known him all our lives, and he's the nicest, jolliest boy we know. But the people he lives with I've never understood at all, and if there were any romance or mystery about any one around here, it would be about them.
Come to think of it, they are mysterious. Carol has always said so, but I never thought much about it. And that only goes to show that Miss Cullingford is right. Keeping a journal does certainly make you go about with your eyes open wider and gives you an interest in things you never thought worth while before. I never thought or cared a bit about Louis's folks before, and now I see they're full of possibilities.
November 24. Fell asleep again last night while I was writing. I guess it's because there's nothing very exciting to write about. However, I'll go on from where I left off about Louis's folks. First, there's the old man. Louis's father and mother have been dead a number of years. I never remember seeing either of them. So he lives with this old man, who, they say, is his guardian. His name is John Meadows, or at least that is what he is always called around here. But Louis says that he is French, and that his real name is Jean Mettot. He is very old; he must be eighty at least. And he is very feeble now, too. He sits all day long in a great armchair by the parlor window. He never reads anything but the papers and some great, heavy volumes of French history, but he spends a great deal of time thinking and dreaming, while he looks way off over the meadows toward the river.
Then there's his daughter, Miss Meadows. She's about forty or fifty years old, I should think. Louis says her name is Yvonne. Certainly, that's a fascinating French name. She's very dark and handsome and quick in her ways, but she's very, very quiet and silent. I never had a real conversation with her in my life, though I've talked to her a great many times. I do all the talking, and she nods or smiles or says "Yes" and "No," and that is absolutely all. I feel as if I'd never really know her, if I talked to her a hundred years. They have one servant, a big French peasant from Normandy, who cooks the meals and takes care of the garden and house.
All this doesn't sound very strange, however. And there is something very mysterious about them,—at least, so Carol has always said. I never paid much attention to the thing before, or noticed it. The curious part of it all is the way they treat Louis. He isn't any real relative, so he says. His parents and their parents have just been dear friends from a long way back. It's plain that they think the world of him, too, just as much as if he were a relative. But there's something more. They are continually watching him with anxious eyes. They guard him as if he weren't able to take care of himself any more than a baby. They don't let him have half the liberty and fun that ordinary boys have. Lots of mothers and fathers, who love their children to distraction, aren't half as fussy and concerned about them as these two people are about a boy who isn't even a relative. It makes Louis awfully annoyed, for he hates like anything to be coddled. Once he fell out of an apple-tree and broke a rib, and they nearly went wild. He had a fever that night and lay in a sort of stupor. But when he was coming out of it he heard them talking awfully queerly about him and wringing their hands and whispering that "he would never, never forgive us if Monsieur Louis were to die."