“To-morrow we start to Lucerne to see the Lion in the rocks, and from there we go to Paris.  Only a little while now, and we shall all be together.  I can hardly wait for you to see my lovely St. Bernard with his Red Cross of Geneva, and the medal that he has earned the right to wear.”

CHAPTER VII.

IN TOURS

A dozen times between Paris and Tours the Little Colonel turned from the car window to smile at her mother, and say with a wriggle of impatience, “Oh, I can’t wait to get there!  Won’t Betty and Eugenia be surprised to see us two whole days earlier than they expected!”

“But you mustn’t count too much on seeing them at the hotel the minute we arrive,” her mother cautioned her.  “You know Cousin Carl wrote that they were making excursions every day to the old chateaux near there, and I think it quite probable they will be away.  So don’t set your heart on seeing them before to-morrow night.  Some of those trips take two days.”

Lloyd turned to the window again and tried to busy herself with the scenes flying past:  the peasant women with handkerchiefs over their heads, and the men in blue cotton blouses and wooden shoes at work in the fields; the lime-trees and the vineyards, the milk-carts that dogs helped to draw.  It was all as Joyce had described it to her, and she pinched herself to make sure that she was awake, and actually in France, speeding along toward the Gate of the Giant Scissors, and all the delightful foreign experience that Joyce had talked about.  She had dreamed many day-dreams about this journey, but the thought that was giving her most pleasure now was not that these dreams were at last coming true, but that in a very short time she would be face to face with Betty and Eugenia.

It was noon when they reached Tours, and went rattling up to the Hotel Bordeaux in the big omnibus.  At first Lloyd was disposed to find fault with the quaint, old-fashioned hotel which Cousin Carl had chosen as their meeting-place.  It had no conveniences like the modern ones to which she had been accustomed.  There was not even an elevator in it.  She looked in dismay at the steep, spiral stairway, winding around and around in the end of the hall, like the steps in the tower of a lighthouse.  On a side table in the hall, several long rows of candles, with snuffers, suggested the kind of light they would have in their bedrooms.

But everything was spotlessly clean, and the landlady and her daughter came out to meet them with an air of giving them a welcome home, which extended even to the dog.  After their hospitable reception of Hero, Lloyd had no more fault to find.  She knew that at no modern hotel would he have been treated so considerately and given the liberty of the house.  Since he was not banished to the courtyard or turned over to a porter’s care, she was willing to climb a dozen spiral stairways, or grope her way through the semi-darkness of a candle-lighted bedroom every night while they were in France, for the sake of having Hero free to come and go as he pleased.