“I don’t care! I guess that’s why I love her so much—because she bears the same name as you, my dear. And you’d love her, too, if you could know her. Oh, dear! I wonder if I did wrong in hiding you down here in the bottom of my trunk? Mrs. Cupp certainly wouldn’t have taken you away from me. The girls might have made fun, and Bess, I s’pose, would have been difficult. But I’d have felt better to have you up stairs in Number Seven, Corridor Four——”
A step in the passage outside the open trunk-room door! Nan rose up in a panic, clutching Beulah to her breast. Somebody was coming.
There was not time to put the doll back into her nest and successfully hide her. The wall at the end of the cellar was of heavy planking. A pile of empty dry-goods cases stood at hand, a narrow alley having been left between the tiers of boxes and the plank wall.
Nan darted behind this screen of boxes, the doll in her arms. She slipped on something in the dark passage and was flung with considerable force against the plank partition. To her amazement and alarm, a narrow section of the partition moved out, dropping downward and outward from the top, as though it were hinged at the bottom.
This narrow door was weighted, so it could not fall abruptly. Nan was flung sprawling upon it, and lay there with her doll, as the shutter dropped quietly to a horizontal position.
She knew she lay over some deep cistern, or the like, and that the plank door bridged it. It was pitch-dark behind the partition and a sour, damp smell, like the odor of an old brewing cellar, rose to her nostrils. Nan Sherwood, startled as she was, uttered no outcry.
CHAPTER XXIV
AN UNEXPECTED MISFORTUNE
As Nan lay on the secret drawbridge, she heard a stealthy footstep on the cement floor of the trunk-room. The step was light, and, plainly, there was but one person approaching. It must be one of the girls. Certainly it could not be Mrs. Cupp, for she was heavy-footed. Nan wished she had not been so foolish as to run, for she was really frightened because of her position over the old cistern. If the intruder was only one of the other girls, coming to open a trunk, she could easily have hidden the doll behind the boxes and waited until the girl had gone up stairs again before putting Beautiful Beulah properly away in her nest.
In a few minutes Nan sat up and began to creep off the dropped door. As her weight was gradually removed from it, the weights began to raise the door into its usual position. There must have been some secret fastening to hold the door shut, that was broken when Nan’s weight was cast against the plank wall.