Blue Robin, the Girl Pioneer — Part 107

Nathalie stood still, and then feeling ashamed that a girl of her age should act the part of a child of five, endeavored to persuade her to let her go, promising to come again soon. She met with no success, and driven desperate by the command, “Come, Nathalie, we must go!” she roughly pulled her hand away. Whereupon, the whimpering cries of the princess degenerated into shrieks of rage, so prolonged and shrill that Nathalie, with a thrill of surprise, immediately recognized from whom Jimmie had learned his shrieks.

As the car sped swiftly along in the direction of home, after the black handkerchief had been relegated to the doctor’s pocket again, Nathalie suddenly reddened furiously, looked queer for a moment, and then burst into stifled laughter, much to the doctor’s amusement, who was gravely watching her.

“Hello!” he cried at length, “what’s up?” after his companion had made one or two ineffectual efforts to control her risibility.

But at last she sobered, and with the tears still in her eyes told how she and Grace had been sent by Mrs. Morrow a short time before—to deliver a letter to Mrs. Van Vorst, and how when they were waiting in the reception room they had heard those same terrible shrieks and frenzied laughter that Jimmie had emitted that morning, and, thinking that it was an insane person, they had run for their lives.

“O dear,” she gasped hysterically, “what a joke on Grace and me! To think of our running away when it was only a cockatoo! Oh, what sillies we were!”

“I agree with you,” returned the doctor so solemnly that the girl flushed and looked at him quickly with shamed eyes, but his humorous twinkle did not agree with his blunt assurance, so Nathalie’s self-esteem suffered no wound.

“You know where you were then to-day?” questioned the doctor slowly after a pause.

“Oh, yes, at the house of the Mystic!”

“The house of the Mystic?” with some astonishment.

“Oh, that is the name the girls have given Mrs. Van Vorst because she acts so queerly. She has been very disagreeable to the Pioneers, they claim, refusing to let them drill on the lawn in the rear of her house. The girls say she hates young people, and then she always dresses so queerly in gray, too. She has shrouded herself in mystery by shutting herself up in that big gray house behind those walls. Edith Whiton insists that there is an insane person in the house and that he chased her the day of the Pilgrim Rally.”