“Think about what?” said Carl, gruffly.
“About Paul’s coming, of course. It’s awfully sad about Uncle Franz—but it is sort of exciting having a new cousin to stay with us, I think.”
“You wouldn’t think it so awfully exciting if you had to share your room with someone you never saw in your life,” returned Carl, sulkily. “I don’t see why one of the store-rooms couldn’t be cleared out for him. All I know is that I won’t stand for it a second if he tries to sling my things around, or scatter his all over the place.”
Carl was never very enthusiastic about sharing anything with anyone (though in this instance one might sympathize with his annoyance) and his fussy love of neatness reached a degree that one would far sooner expect to find in a crabbed old maid than in a boy of sixteen years.
Jane did not reply to this indignant objection.
“What do you think he’ll be like?” she asked next, scuffling through the piles of ruddy brown leaves that lay thick on the uneven brick walk.
“I think he’ll be a big, roistering bully. That’s what I think,” answered Carl savagely; his lips set in a stubborn line, and the lenses of his spectacles glinted so angrily, that Jane decided to drop the subject.
For several minutes they walked along in silence: the twins marching ahead, chattering like little magpies, their yellow pigtails bobbing under their round brown felt hats. Each clutched her spelling book and reader, and her package of sandwiches and cookies; each wore a bright blue dress, a bright red sweater, and a snow white pinafore.
It was fully a mile to the school, but as a rule the brisk young Lamberts walked it in twenty minutes. This morning, however, Jane dawdled shamelessly.
“I don’t feel like school to-day a bit,” she remarked, looking up through the trees.