Before I had time to ring the bell, Nora opened the front door; she looked very much excited, and asked breathlessly, "Did you meet them? Have you seen them?"
Of course I didn't understand. "Meet whom? What d'you mean?" I asked in surprise.
"The children. Then they are lost!" answered Nora, and she sat down on a chair in the hall and burst out crying. Then out came Phil and Felix from the drawing-room, where they had been with Nora, and I heard the whole story.
It seems that soon after I left for the doctor's, Judge went down stairs and asked cook for some gingerbread,—"enough for the four of us," he said,—and some time later, when Nora went up to the schoolroom to see what the children were doing, not one of them was there, nor could they be found in the house. Nora flew to tell Felix and Phil, and in the hurried search from garret to cellar which everybody made,—except nurse, she wasn't told anything of it,—it was found that the children's every-day hats were gone.
Of course, as soon as I heard that, I remembered the whispering under the schoolroom table, and I felt at once that the children had run away. I just wished I had told Nora about it, or that I had come right back from the doctor's; I might have prevented their going.
"NORA TORE IT OPEN."
While I was telling Nora and the boys what I thought about the matter, Hannah came flying into the drawing-room,—she was so excited, she forgot to knock. She held a cocked-hat note in her hand,—Kathie is great on cocked-hat notes and paper lamplighters. "Oh, Miss Nora! it's meself that's just found this on the flure mostly under the big Sarytogy thrunk,—the one that's open," she cried, almost out of breath from her rush down the steps.
"Nora" was scrawled in Kathie's handwriting on the outside of the note. In an instant Nora tore it open, but she passed it right over to Phil. "Read it,—I can't," she said in a shaky voice. So he did.
The note was very short and the spelling was funny, though we didn't think of that until afterward; this is what was in it: "We are not goging to stay here to be treted like this so we have run away we are goging to Nannie becaws she tretes us good. I have token my new parrasole for the sun goodby we have Jugs bank with us Kathie."