"I'm sure I don't know, Louis," I replied; "but tell me, do you know anything about those portraits that hang on the wall opposite your bed? Why are two covered up, and who is that boy in the middle?"
To my astonishment, Louis seized hold of my arm and whispered:
"Sue, Sue, I hate those pictures. I hate that one in the middle. I'm _afraid_ of it! I--"
Before he could say any more we heard Miss Yvonne coming up the stairs to tell me that my time was up and that Louis must rest. And so he couldn't go on.
But why, _why_ does Louis hate the picture of that boy, and why, above all things, is he afraid of it? Was there ever so curious a mystery?
Despite the fact that Sue and Carol boiled with impatience for over a week, conjecturing what it could possibly be that made Louis afraid of the picture in Monsieur's room, they found out nothing new on the subject, for the simple reason that there was never a moment when they again saw him alone. To ask him about it when others were in the room was impossible. Two days after Sue's last visit he was allowed to sit up, and a day or two after that he was permitted to walk about for a few steps. Then the nurse took her leave, and Louis insisted on returning to his own room on the ground floor.
"And only to think," sighed Sue, when she heard of it, "now we'll probably never see those strange pictures on Monsieur's wall again. I could cry with vexation when I think of it. Carol, do you feel as if there were something terribly mysterious about them,--not only the two covered ones, but the boy's, also? I wonder if it haunts you the same as it does me?"
"It certainly does," admitted Carol, "and yesterday I wrote a little poem about it. Here it is. What do you think of it?"
She handed Sue a scrap of paper on which the verses were written. The two girls had dropped off the trolley on their way home from high school, and were bound for the library. Sue took the paper and studied it carefully as she walked.
"I like it a lot," she acknowledged, as she handed it back. "Especially those last two lines:
'O boy of nut-brown hair and smiling eyes, Speak out and tell the secret that you know.'
Really, it's awfully pretty and the best thing you've done yet. Why don't you show it to Miss Cullingford. It hasn't any direct reference to Louis's affairs in it, and I'll warrant she'd recommend it to be published in our high school paper, _The Argus_."