Mrs. Holt is a rather distant cousin who knows Uncle Pieter very well and was a much younger friend of his wife, who is dead. Her mother, Mrs. Perry, will be here pretty soon, they say. She went on a little visit and keeps staying. Cousin Di worries about it, though I'm sure I don't know why. Two of her friends from Albany have been here this week and they have had a fine time. Uncle Pieter likes to have company, Cousin Andy says, though he doesn't pay much attention to anybody, I must say. I suppose he just likes to have the big place full of people, not to be lonesome.
Cousin Di is kind and easy-going. My lessons are a myth, for which I am not sorry. I don't see how I could have studied so far. Uncle Pieter looked at me one time, at dinner, and said, "You need not hurry about lessons, Diana. Jannet looks as if she has had about enough of school. I suppose, Jannet, that you have been trained to think that school hours are the only thing in the world worth keeping?"
"Yes, sir," I said. "Aren't they? Most of the girls I know that amount to anything get their lessons."
For once Uncle Pieter laughed out. "Yes, yes," he said, "I suppose that is so. Whatever you have to do, keep at it, if you want to put it through. But we shall change matters a little, with the permission of your guardian, of course."
I did not like the way he said that, but then he does not know how fine Miss Hilliard is. I looked straight at him, but not saucily, and then I said, "Miss Hilliard is the one who has taken good care of me for all these years." I did not mean it for a "dig" at him, since of course he did not know that I existed. But I'm sure that he took it that way. He froze right up, and I wished that I had not said anything.
"I must see Miss Hilliard very soon," he answered, "and relieve her of her charge."
That scared me so that I sat right down at my lovely desk with the _secret drawers_, as soon as I reached my room, and wrote the conversation to Miss Hilliard. And I've wished ever since that I hadn't. I'm always doing something that I wish afterwards I hadn't,--but you know me, Lina!
So you see that I don't know whether I like my uncle very much or not, though I am grateful to him for hunting me up and that _ought_ to make up for everything else. I think that Cousin Andy knows that his father is a little queer, for he makes it up to me by being extra nice. He is Andrew Van Meter and is somewhere around thirty years old, perhaps older, and was in the war. He was shell-shocked and wounded, but won't talk about it. He has some trouble with his back and there are days when he does not come to meals. I wanted to do something for him, read to him, or anything, but Cousin Di said not to, that Andrew wanted to be by himself at those times.