"Teresa!" I cried, "I've got it now! You want Mademoiselle Virtud to occupy the house across the road. Oh, that'll be just wonderful!"
Teresa tried to put on her most severe air, but failed completely.
"Well, supposing that's not so!" she said, as with a grin she pushed me out of the door.
Mademoiselle Virtud came over that very afternoon. I hadn't been mistaken. She and Teresa went immediately across the road to see the empty house, the owner having left the key with us. At the end of a half-hour they returned.
"It's all arranged," and Teresa beamed. "She's coming to live here right across the road. I've thought of the thing for a long time, and now at last the house I wanted is empty. Monsieur Bouché has promised to fix the fence and put a new coat of paint on the house, and with some of our plants placed in the front garden, it will be a fitting place for your dear teacher and her Gabriel to live in."
"You'll certainly spoil us!" said Mlle. Virtud. "What a joy it will be to leave that stuffy apartment in town. And Gabriel is so pale and weak! This lovely air of the open country will make a new boy of him!"
It was a wonderful time we had, arranging things before our new neighbors moved in. Teresa bought some neat linen curtains for the windows of the little house. Paula and I gathered quantities of flowers from our garden and placed them over the chimney-piece, and on the bedroom shelves and in the window-seats—and how the floors and windows did shine after we had finished polishing them!
When our teacher arrived in a coach with Gabriel packed in among the usual quantity of small household things of all kinds, great was her gratitude and surprise to find, in the transformed house, such signs of our care and affection for her. It was indeed the happiest moving day that could possibly be imagined. There wasn't a great quantity of furniture, and in an hour or so after our new neighbors' arrival we had everything installed in its proper place, to say nothing of the bright fire burning in the tiny grate and the kettle singing merrily above it. One would hardly have dreamed that it had been an empty house that very morning. Even Louis who had come home for a week-end holiday had sailed in and worked with us in putting the little cottage in order.
That night the newly-arrived tenants ate with us, after which Louis carried
Gabriel pick-a-back to his new home across the road.
Our teacher's prophecy regarding Gabriel was a correct one. Day by day he grew stronger. Teresa looked out for him during school-hours, and with his bright happy ways he soon became a great favorite with the neighborhood boys.