“Don’t be alarmed,” said Victoria. “You have me.”
Victoria had bragged all day. She was still bragging when she climbed into bed, with Lillian’s cot at her left, Augusta’s at her right.
An hour later, the west corridor was wrapped in silence; or it would have been if nine girls had not assembled in Henrietta’s room to whisper excitedly in one another’s ears. Inadvertently, they whispered too in Miss Woodruff’s, as she stood listening just outside the door. Miss Woodruff was not a prying person. She was merely assuring herself that the noises that she couldn’t help hearing were made by girls, not burglars.
“Good!” whispered the pleased teacher as she gathered the gist of this animated buzzing. “It’s a thing I’d love to do myself. Victoria had it coming to her. I shall aid and abet those merry plotters by staying very sound asleep for the next hour.”
Whereupon Miss Woodruff very gently closed her own door and to all appearances had finished her matronly duties for the night.
Ten minutes later, a small white scout slipped noiselessly down the dark corridor toward the room in which Victoria was sleeping. Presently she slipped back into Henrietta’s.
“All three are sound asleep,” reported Jane. “You could stick pins into Victoria and she wouldn’t know it. Now’s the time for action. Don’t waste a minute. She’ll never be sounder asleep than she is now.”
“Jane,” whispered Henrietta, “you and Marjory must get into those two empty beds in the room directly across the hall from Victoria’s and stay in them long enough to get them warmed up, so we can move those other two girls into them. We’ll wait fifteen minutes longer. But if Lillian and Augusta should wake up, we’ll just have to whisk them into a closet and clap our hands over their mouths.”
For perhaps three quarters of an hour that night, Miss Woodruff heard the light patter of bare feet on the corridor matting, the subdued whisperings of girlish voices, the quickly hushed clattering of wood against wood, of metal against crockery, the dragging of bulky objects through narrow doorways. These sounds were punctuated by little gusts of stifled laughter, followed each time by brief periods of absolute silence.
“I do hope,” she whispered, “they’ll succeed. Victoria certainly needs taking down. Dear me, how Marjory giggles! She was never designed for a career of successful burglary.”