Read "The Lonely House" by Marie Belloc Lowndes online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
As for M. Popeau, who was looking about him trying to find out if any changes had taken place in five very long years, he was telling himself, for perhaps the thousandth time in his life, what very queer, odd people the British were!
He liked them, even better than he had done when, as a young man, he had met with a good deal of kindness in England. But still, how queer to think that a nice girl-a really nice girl-should permit such a stranger as was this Captain Stuart to call on her-without any kind of proper introduction. He hoped her Italian friends-or were they relations? -would not misunderstand. He feared they certainly would do so, unless she pretended-but somehow he did not think she would do that-that the young man was an old acquaintance, someone who had known her at home, in her uncle's house.