"I don't mean it in that way," said Rosanna. "She will not change me, Helen dear, but in some way or other—Oh, I can't tell what I do mean!"
"Too many tarts!" laughed Helen. "I confess she is a queer girl, but we don't have to see much of her, and I doubt if we will. We have enough work coming along this spring without taking on any more than we have to. I want to earn all the merits and emblems that I possibly can by summer time, and I shall be a busy girl if I do it. And you want to do a lot of Scout work, Elise, now that you have learned to speak English so nicely."
"Merci—I mean, thank you," said Elise. "Indeed I do much want to do something to benefit myself, and more to please our dear Captain. And somehow I think you are both seeing that strange Claire wrongly. I think the cloud hangs over her, and she is most, most sad, most gloomy in its shadow."
"Dear me, how mysterious!" said Helen. "To me, she seems just like any other girl, except that she has gorgeous clothes and those queer green eyes, and such wads and wads of hair, and that Chinaman, and all those splendid embroideries. And of course it is odd the way she sits and never moves her hands but looks over your head as though there was some writing on the wall."
"Perhaps there is," said Rosanna. "Like that man in the Bible, you know, who had a warning."
Rosanna, as she spoke, little dreamed that there was writing on every wall, in every cloud, that poor Claire saw and read with a feeling of hopeless horror.
Leaning close to his handsome daughter in the big luxurious limousine, Colonel Maslin was saying to her, "Well, Bird o' Paradise, how do you like your new friends? Are they as friendly and fascinating as Kentucky girls are supposed to be?"
"You met them," said Claire evenly. "What do you think?"
"A mere man isn't supposed to think," laughed Colonel Maslin. "They seem delightful to me, so pretty and dainty and girlish. Stray sunbeams."
Claire laughed. "I should say you thought quite fully on the subject, daddy!"