Paula the Waldensian - Eva Lecomte

"Well, supposing that's not so!" she said, as with a grin she pushed me
out of the door.
Mademoiselle Virtud came over that very afternoon. I hadn't been
mistaken. She and Teresa went immediately across the road to see the empty
house, the owner having left the key with us. At the end of a half-hour they
returned.
"It's all arranged," and Teresa beamed. "She's coming to live here right
across the road. I've thought of the thing for a long time, and now at last the
house I wanted is empty. Monsieur Bouché has promised to fix the fence and
put a new coat of paint on the house, and with some of our plants placed in
the front garden, it will be a fitting place for your dear teacher and her
Gabriel to live in."
"You'll certainly spoil us!" said Mlle. Virtud. "What a joy it will be to
leave that stuffy apartment in town. And Gabriel is so pale and weak! This
lovely air of the open country will make a new boy of him!"
It was a wonderful time we had, arranging things before our new
neighbors moved in. Teresa bought some neat linen curtains for the windows
of the little house. Paula and I gathered quantities of flowers from our garden
and placed them over the chimney-piece, and on the bedroom shelves and in
the window-seats--and how the floors and windows did shine after we had
finished polishing them!
When our teacher arrived in a coach with Gabriel packed in among the
usual quantity of small household things of all kinds, great was her gratitude
and surprise to find, in the transformed house, such signs of our care and
affection for her. It was indeed the happiest moving day that could possibly
be imagined. There wasn't a great quantity of furniture, and in an hour or so
after our new neighbors' arrival we had everything installed in its proper
180