Jack sang coon-songs and even did a cake-walk. I got up and helped him in that, just to shock Mabel. She thinks cake-walking is very unladylike, and always looks scandalized when I begin anything of the kind.
Aunt Jane—to punish us, I think—started the Professor going on his pet microbes, and once he was started, no one else had any show whatever. He droned on about bacilli and other horrors, and gravely assured us that old cabin was undoubtedly swarming with awful-sounding germs. Fancy being married to such a man—ugh!
Aunt Jane presently fell asleep, and as Clifford took to staring moodily into the fire and not seeming to remember anything but his thoughts, Mabel soon followed Aunt Jane’s example. I was hungry and cross, and even the Professor couldn’t talk me to sleep.
I wrapped my golf-cape around me and cuddled in an old armchair in front of the fireplace, with Jack and the Professor upon either side of me and Clifford on a little bench against the wall. Aunt Jane and Mabel were on the side opposite Clifford, though they, being asleep, do not count.
I was beginning to hold my eyes open with some effort, when something roused me, and I sat up straight and listened. The storm was still beating furiously against the cabin walls, but another sound was distinctly audible. There could be no mistake—someone was walking back and forth in the other room.
We looked at one another, and I admit a creepy feeling went up my spine just at first.
Clifford caught up a brand from the fire and started for the closed door, and we all followed him. When we crowded into the doorway we saw nothing but the dust and the cobwebs and the dancing glare of Clifford’s torch upon the rough board walls. It was such a bare little room that I think we all felt a bit ashamed of our nerves.
The footsteps had ceased, and only the wind and rain, beating upon the low roof, could be heard.
“It’s the wind,” said Clifford, pointing his torch downward to freshen the blaze.
“It was the water dripping from some branch upon the roof,” said the Professor—and that was the most sensible remark he had made that night.