“Abroad!” cried Jo.  “Oh, tell me about it!  I love dearly to hear people describe their travels.”

Laurie didn’t seem to know where to begin, but Jo’s eager questions soon set him going, and he told her how he had been at school in Vevay, where the boys never wore hats and had a fleet of boats on the lake, and for holiday fun went on walking trips about Switzerland with their teachers.

“Don’t I wish I’d been there!” cried Jo.  “Did you go to Paris?”

“We spent last winter there.”

“Can you talk French?”

“We were not allowed to speak anything else at Vevay.”

“Do say some!  I can read it, but can’t pronounce.”

“Quel nom a cette jeune demoiselle en les pantoufles jolis?”

“How nicely you do it!  Let me see . . . you said, ’Who is the young lady in the pretty slippers’, didn’t you?”

“Oui, mademoiselle.”

“It’s my sister Margaret, and you knew it was!  Do you think she is pretty?”

“Yes, she makes me think of the German girls, she looks so fresh and quiet, and dances like a lady.”

Jo quite glowed with pleasure at this boyish praise of her sister, and stored it up to repeat to Meg.  Both peeped and critisized and chatted till they felt like old acquaintances.  Laurie’s bashfulness soon wore off, for Jo’s gentlemanly demeanor amused and set him at his ease, and Jo was her merry self again, because her dress was forgotten and nobody lifted their eyebrows at her.  She liked the ‘Laurence boy’ better than ever and took several good looks at him, so that she might describe him to the girls, for they had no brothers, very few male cousins, and boys were almost unknown creatures to them.

“Curly black hair, brown skin, big black eyes, handsome nose, fine teeth, small hands and feet, taller than I am, very polite, for a boy, and altogether jolly.  Wonder how old he is?”

It was on the tip of Jo’s tongue to ask, but she checked herself in time and, with unusual tact, tried to find out in a round-about way.

“I suppose you are going to college soon?  I see you pegging away at your books, no, I mean studying hard.”  And Jo blushed at the dreadful ‘pegging’ which had escaped her.

Laurie smiled but didn’t seem shocked, and answered with a shrug.  “Not for a year or two.  I won’t go before seventeen, anyway.”

“Aren’t you but fifteen?” asked Jo, looking at the tall lad, whom she had imagined seventeen already.

“Sixteen, next month.”

“How I wish I was going to college!  You don’t look as if you liked it.”

“I hate it!  Nothing but grinding or skylarking.  And I don’t like the way fellows do either, in this country.”

“What do you like?”

“To live in Italy, and to enjoy myself in my own way.”

Jo wanted very much to ask what his own way was, but his black brows looked rather threatening as he knit them, so she changed the subject by saying, as her foot kept time, “That’s a splendid polka!  Why don’t you go and try it?”