Mermaid and Monsieur Guy Vanton made friends with each other quickly, aided, perhaps, by the graces of the French language. At eleven years it is not hard to[100] learn French, especially if your instructor speaks with a pure accent and makes conversation in it the order of the day. Mermaid found that Guy did not go to school because his father didn’t wish him to, for reasons not given. Guy said he didn’t know what was back of his father’s objections, unless it was that he would have to go away from home. “You see, I’ve had the equivalent of high school,” he told Mermaid. “It would have to be college—or maybe a year somewhere to get ready for college. I don’t much care. I read a lot—we’ve heaps of books—and I—I write sometimes,” he confessed, diffidently.

“What do you write?” Mermaid ventured. “Say it in French,” he reminded her and after he had corrected her question so put, he replied in French: “Mostly poetry.”

He got quite red, so that Tommy Lupton, who had been dishonourably spying from behind a shrub in the next yard, was incensed.

“Some day I’m going to knock his block off,” Tommy told himself.

Afterward he accosted Mermaid down the street, greeting her calmly but with a touch of sadness in his tone. She was a nice, if misguided, girl; Tommy didn’t want to hurt her feelings but this business couldn’t be allowed to go on.

“Say, Mermaid,” he began, and then faltered a moment in the performance of his unpleasant duty.[101] “We—we never see anything of you any more these days,” he finished. It was not just the thing, but it was, perhaps, best to lead up to the point gradually.

Mermaid seemed unaware that anything was wrong.

“Come down to the house, Tommy, and I’ll give you a cookie,” she invited him sweetly.

“I don’t believe I want a cookie. I don’t believe I want anything to eat,” answered Mr. Lupton, seriously.

Mermaid looked at him with attention. “You aren’t sick, are you?” she said, anxiously. “There’s two cases of scarlet fever in Patchogue, I heard. You ought not to be going there to high school if you feel that way.”

Indignation at the turn the conversation was taking overcame Mr. Lupton. He did not want to talk about himself but about Mermaid, and particularly about the dangerous acquaintances—well, acquaintance—she was cultivating. He abandoned the possible diplomatic approaches to the subject and blurted out: “What do you want to have anything to do with that Vanton feller, for, anyway, Mermaid? If we fellers don’t have anything to do with him I shouldn’t think you’d—you’d——” He stuck hopelessly.

Mermaid’s very bright blue eyes were on him and he found it difficult to collect his thoughts and present his argument.

“Shouldn’t think you’d—have him around,” he concluded, unhappily.

[102]Mermaid lifted her chin and her eyes flashed.

“I’d like to know, Tommy Lupton, what you know about him, anyway!”

Just the opening Mr. Lupton craved. He poured it all out eagerly.

“Why—why, he’s a regular sissy, Mermaid, and you know it. He’s a—a hermit. I mean he never mixes with us fellers, and of course we’re glad of it; we wouldn’t have anything to do with him,” Tommy assured her, not bothering the logic. “He’s some kind of a foreigner, probably a dago,” he inferred, darkly. “He smokes cigarettes.” Mr. Lupton, who smoked only cornsilk in secret, saw the distinction clearly. “If you don’t look out some of these days he’ll be putting his arm around you!”

He stopped, appalled at his own frankness. But Mermaid merely laughed.

“He’s not a foreigner; he only ju............