Elizabeth Ann could set the table very nicely, but this noon her mind was not on her task. She did so wonder what could be in Aunt Jennie’s letter. Aunt Jennie, when she wrote, usually wrote the kind of a letter that Cousin Nellie liked to read aloud at the lunch or dinner table. Aunt Jennie sent messages to everyone—even to Lyn, whom she had never seen, but had heard of, through Elizabeth Ann and Cousin Nellie.
“I don’t see why Cousin Nellie didn’t read the letter out loud,” Elizabeth Ann puzzled, carrying in the bread plate.
Lex came up the back steps, his arms filled with books.
“Is it time to eat?” he asked in surprise. “I just brought these books in to pack them away. I won’t need them again and I hate to leave everything till the last minute.”
“Tell Miss Nellie lunch is ready,” Lyn called after him as he walked through the kitchen and on into the rest of the house.
Uncle Doctor and Cousin Nellie came to the dining room at once. Elizabeth Ann looked at Uncle Doctor closely, for sometimes she could guess what he was thinking. But not to-day. He pulled back Cousin Nellie’s chair for her and helped Elizabeth Ann into hers, without saying a single word. Lex came back and they began to eat, and still no one mentioned Aunt Jennie’s letter.
Now Elizabeth Ann was a courteous little girl and she knew far more than some little girls do. Not for worlds would she say “letter,” if she thought that Cousin Nellie did not wish to talk about it. And Elizabeth Ann knew that if Cousin Nellie did want to talk of the letter, she would say something about it—so Miss Elizabeth Ann ate her luncheon quietly and did not ask questions.
While she is eating her lunch may be a good time to tell you a bit about her. That is, if you’re not already acquainted. Perhaps you have read the first book in this series, called “Adventures of Elizabeth Ann.” Then you know she was a little girl whose parents were traveling in Japan, and who had been sent to make friends with her relatives who loved her as soon as they knew her. Elizabeth Ann visited ever so many aunts in the city, in the country and at the seashore, and she was lucky enough to find a girl cousin, Doris, almost her own age. Elizabeth Ann and Doris went to school together and it was during a vacation from school that Elizabeth Ann went to visit Uncle Doctor who was her mother’s uncle and her own great-uncle. Cousin Nellie kept house for Uncle Doctor, whose real name was Doctor Crandall Lewis. And Elizabeth Ann had such a lovely vacation with Uncle Doctor and helped him so much that the next summer, when he went South to do some special work, Uncle Doctor took Elizabeth Ann with him. He took Lex, too, who was studying to be a doctor, and who ran Uncle Doctor’s car for him, and of course Cousin Nellie went. And their summer in the country near the little town of Cally has been told you in the book just before this one, called “Elizabeth Ann and Uncle Doctor.”
That is why you find them down South now—the summer was over and in a few days they were going home, Elizabeth Ann to Seabridge, where Doris Mason and Aunt Jennie and the other Mason cousins lived; Uncle Doctor and Cousin Nellie and Lyn to the town of Chester where they lived.
But Elizabeth Ann has kept still long enough and it’s time to see what happens next.