"Oh, Frances, do try, like a brick!" poor Joey cried in a frenzy. The Professor only just gone; there might be time to stop him yet. Fennell the gardener was a large man, and he was probably somewhere about the place.
The key rattled, half-turned, stopped. "Bother!" cried Frances. "Run, Miss Tiddles, there's a dear, and see if the Professor's gone yet."
Wonder of wonders. Tiddles must be in or near the Lab—Tiddles who had such a horror of it. But Joey had not time for astonishment. "Stop her! Don't let her go!" she cried. If the Professor knew that she was escaping from her prison!
Frances seemed to be bending all her powers to the turning of the key. She was a determined person, accustomed to resisting the onslaughts of the Lower School upon the sugar basin, when she poured out the tea. "Almost got it—there!" she said, with a gasp.
The key wheezed and turned; the door opened—Joey was free. "Thank you, Frances!" she gasped, and fled past Frances, past little Tiddles standing solemn-eyed and scared at the top of the Lab steps, and away towards the house. She had put on her other shoe while Frances was wrestling with the key; but it was a dirty, hatless girl, with torn stockings and scratched hands, who flung herself round the angle of the house, as the steadily decreasing throb, throb of a motor-bicycle announced that the Professor was making full speed down the drive, and out to the world beyond.
Joey did not call the gardener. The Professor had gone; he would be no good now. She dashed through the side door, and fled like the wind to Miss Conyngham's room. It would be empty now, of course; there never was such an emptiness anywhere as there was about the College to-day. But the telephone was there, and the telephone was what she wanted just now. John was the one person she could think of as able and willing to help; one wouldn't go to Frances with an unsupported story like hers. Frances would look at you as though she was thinking "Not another lump—one is plenty, Miss Jocelyn," and there would be an end of it. But John would understand.
She put the call through with feverish haste, and a hand that shook a little. Her knees were trembling too, and her mouth was dry, but it did not strike her that she had had no dinner. Other things were mattering so much.
A maid's voice answered her. "Can I speak to Mr. John Sturt?" Joey asked, trying to sound ordinary and business-like. "Oh—would you give him a message and say it's dreadfully important, please? Say I'm coming, and I don't think the Professor is French after all—he'll know—and he's just gone off in a tearing hurry, and he took things from the Lab in his cigar case, and he's on a motorbike, and he locked me in." Joey jammed on the receiver, and, without waiting to get coat or hat, fled out of the front door and down the drive. She hoped Miss Conyngham wouldn't be very vexed by what she was going to do; but anyhow she would have to do it. She set out running through the iron gates and along that straight marsh road, along which the Professor must have gone first. She had forgotten to ask that a car should be sent to fetch her, but somehow she had no doubt that would be done. Only, she could not wait.
Her faith in John was justified. John must have beaten all speed limits. She hadn't run a mile, battling with the fierce side-wind that seemed to take all her breath away, when a cloud of dust in front of her, resolved itself into a long-nosed grey racing-car; there was a rending screech, and John's voice hailed her.
"Good! Thought I'd meet you; jump in. Mind my crutches."