They had a wonderful trip to mountains and lakes and seaside, staying as long as they pleased wherever they liked, and everywhere making friends and having 280 good times; but toward the end of their trip the children began to get restless for the little pink-and-white cottage and home.
“We really ought to get back and see how the Christian Endeavor Society is getting along,” said Allison one day as they glided through a little village that reminded them of home. “I don’t see any place as nice as our town, do you, Cloudy? And I don’t feel quite right anywhere but home on Sunday, do you? For, really, all the Christian Endeavor societies I’ve been to this summer acted as if their members were all away on vacations and they didn’t care whether school kept or not.”
And so they went home to begin another happy winter. But the very first day there came a rift in their happiness in the shape of the new professor of chemistry, a man about Julia Cloud’s age, whom Ellen Robinson had met on her visit to Thayerville, and told about her sister. Ellen had suggested that maybe he could get her sister to take him to board!
To this day Julia Cloud has never decided whether Ellen really thought Julia would take a professor from the college to board, or whether she just sent him there as a joke. There was a third solution, which Julia Cloud kept in the back of her mind and only took out occasionally with an angry, troubled look when she was very much annoyed. It was that Ellen was still anxious to have her sister get married, and she had taken this way to get her acquainted with a man whom she thought a “good match”. If Julia had been sure that this idea had entered into her sister’s thoughts, she might have slammed the door in Professor Armitage’s face that night when he had the audacity to come and ask to be taken into Cloudy Villa as a boarder.
“Why, the very idea!” said Leslie with snapping eyes. “As if we wanted a man always around! No, indeed! Horrors! Wouldn’t that be awful?”
But Professor Armitage, like everybody else who came once to Cloudy Villa, liked it, and begged a thousand pardons for presuming, but came again and again, until even the children began to like him in a way, and did not in the least mind having him around.
But the day came at last, about the middle of the winter, or nearer to the spring, when Leslie and Allison began to realize that Professor Armitage came to see their Cloudy Jewel, and they met in solemn conclave to talk it over.