“For goodness’ sakes! About me? Why? Where?”
“There. It isn’t marked, and I was the longest time trying to discover why Leslie had left the paper. After I’d gone all over it hunting for a marked passage, I thought it must be a mistake and that she’d simply left it because she was tired of carrying it round, and the maid hadn’t understood. But going over it column by column, 411I at last saw the word Hawthorne and those other names. ’Una Americana’–‘An American’–the article is entitled. It looks to me, Nell, as if your whole life’s history might be printed there.”
“For the land’s sake! Now, who do you suppose can have done that? What on earth would anybody want to–”
“I’ve been puzzling over it and puzzling over it till I’m about played out trying to make sense of it, and my head aches like fury. Oh, never mind my head! Now you’ve got back I don’t care.”
“And your French doesn’t help you to translate it?”
“Yes, it does help–some. I can pick out lots of words, and here and there a whole sentence; but what I can’t get at is the spirit of the whole, whether it’s meant to be friendly or not.”
“Have you tried with a dictionary? Where’s the dictionary? Get it, and we’ll pick it out if it takes all night.”
“Indeed, I wish I had a dictionary. Mine’s French-English. I asked Clotilde if she had an Italian-English or an Italian-French, and she said yes, but at home. Isn’t it provoking? I certainly wasn’t going to show this to her, and get her to translate it for me before I’d consulted with you.”
“Bother!” said Aurora, thoughtfully, with her eyes on the cryptic print. Estelle sat close, examining the sheet over her shoulder. “Elena means Helen, doesn’t it? I guess it must, as it comes here before Barton. They’ve got my old name. And there’s Bewick–Bewick, and here’s Colorado. They’ve got the whole thing, fast enough. It’s the doing of an enemy; there can be no doubt of that.”
“I know who you’re thinking about.”