But at this point Claudia suddenly, and perhaps rather fortunately, interrupted.
"What's that queer noise?" she asked. "It sounds like a sort of suppressed giggling!" There was dead silence for a moment.
"I don't hear anything," said Lorraine.
"I do, though!"
"It's a kind of snorting!"
"I believe it's at the back of the summer-house."
Patsie dashed up and darted round, and, with a yell of vengeance, flung herself upon three juniors crouched with their impudent noses pressed to a crack in the boards, through which they had been spectators as well as listeners during the proceedings. A fourth child was in the very act of descending from the garden wall.
"You young blighters! How dare you! You deserve to break your legs, swarming over a high wall like that! It would just have served you right if you had, and I shouldn't have been sorry for you. Not the least teeny tiny bit, though you limped about on crutches for the rest of your young lives! Come here at once!"
As a speedy method of collecting the offenders, Patsie seized them by their pig-tails, and hauled them in a bunch to the front of the summer-house. Lorraine eyed them severely.
"If this had been a Masonic meeting," she remarked, "you'd have been obliged to have your heads chopped off for eavesdropping. Freemasons keep a sword-bearer on duty, so I'm told, to kill anybody who tries to intrude. I'm not sure if we oughtn't to do something——"