“Some day you must put that all in a book, Betty,” said Cousin Carl, when she had finished.  “When we go to see the gate, I’ll take my camera, and we’ll get a picture of it.  Now I feel that I can properly appreciate it, having heard its wonderful history.”

There was a teasing light in his eyes that made Lloyd say, “Now you’re laughin’ at us, Cousin Carl, but it doesn’t make any difference.  I’d rathah see that gate than any old chateau in France.”

CHAPTER IX.

AT THE GATE OF THE GIANT SCISSORS

Each of the girls answered Joyce’s letter, but the Little Colonel’s was the first to find its way to the little brown house in Plainsville, Kansas.

“Dear Joyce,” she wrote.  “We were all dreadfully disappointed yesterday morning when mother and Papa Jack came back from Madame’s villa, and told us that she could not let us stay there.  She has some English people in the house, and could not give us rooms even for one night.  She said that we must be disappointed also about seeing Jules, for his Uncle Martin has taken him to Paris to stay a month.  I could have cried, I was so sorry.

“Ever since we left home I have been planning what we should do when we reached the Gate of the Giant Scissors.  I wanted to do all the things that you did, as far as possible.  I was going to have a barbecue for Jules, down in the garden by the pagoda, and to have some kind of a midsummer fete for the peasant children who came to your Christmas tree.

“Madame was sorry, too, that she couldn’t take us, when she found that we were your friends, and she asked mother to bring us all out the next day and have tea in the pagoda.  As soon as mother and Papa Jack came back, they took us to see Sister Denisa at the home of the Little Sisters of the Poor.  I wish you could have seen her face shine when we told her that we were friends of yours.  She said lovely things about you, and the tears came into her eyes when she told us how much she missed your visits, after you went back to America.

“Next day we went to Madame’s, and she took us over to the Ciseaux place to see Jules’s great-aunt Desiree.  She is a beautiful old lady.  She talked about you as if you were an angel, or a saint with a halo around your head.  She feels that if it hadn’t been for you that she might still be only ‘Number Thirty-nine’ among all those paupers, instead of being the mistress of her brother’s comfortable home.

“After we left there, we passed the place where Madame’s washerwoman lives.  A little girl peeped out at us through the hedge.  Madame told her to show the American ladies the doll that she had in her arms.  She held it out, and then snatched it back as if she were jealous of our even looking at it.  Madame told us that it was the one you gave her at the Noel fete.  It is the only doll the child ever had, and she has carried it ever since, even taking it to bed with her.  She has named it for you.