“Ah, you have the wanderlust, too! I’d like to go with you to your Land o’ Dreaming.” Fortunately Billy did not hear this remark, as the brakeman opened the door at this juncture and shouted the name of a station.
For once Billy was glad when the brakeman finally called: “P-err-reston!” If he had to get out, so had the hated count. He never had taken as much of a fancy to de Lestis as the other members of the neighborhood had, anyhow, and now he knew why he had never liked him.
“He is a selfish, arrogant foreigner,” he raged on in his boyish way. “He might have let me sit with Nan part of the way, anyhow.”
Nan went home quite pleased with the interesting conversation she had had on the train. The count was rapidly becoming a warm friend of the family. Everybody liked him but Lucy, and she had no especial reason for disliking him.
“He’s got no time for me and I guess that’s the reason,” she said when questioned. “Mag doesn’t cotton to him much, either.”
“Well, I should think you would be glad for Father to have somebody to talk to,” said Helen. “You and Mag are too young to have much in common with a grown-up gentleman.”
“Pooh, Miss Grandmother! I’m most as old as Nan and he cottons to her for fair. I know why he doesn’t think much of Mag and me—it is because he knows we know he is nothing but a Dutchman.”
“Dutchman! Nonsense! Dutchmen proper come from Holland and Count de Lestis is a Hungarian.”
“Well, he can talk Dutch like a Prussian, anyhow. You oughter hear him jabbering with that German family that live over near Preston. He brings old Mr. Blitz newspapers all the time and they laugh and laugh over jokes in them; at least, they must be jokes to make them laugh so.”
“Of course the count speaks German. He speaks a great many languages,” declared Helen with the dignified air that she thought necessary to assume when she and Lucy got in a discussion.