A feverish sense of impatience took possession of Mary Louise. It was cruel, she stormed, that in her hour of triumph she should be imprisoned alone in a dark house. Wouldn’t somebody miss her and come to her rescue? Where was her father? Why hadn’t he driven out here to Center Square when he returned to Stoddard House last night—and had found her missing?
But suppose—awful thought—that he had not returned! Suppose he had missed finding Mrs. Ferguson and had been deceived by that letter of hers into pursuing the woman to Florida! Mrs. Hilliard would conclude that he had taken her—Mary Louise—with him, when neither returned!
A trip to Florida, Mary Louise figured, might consume almost a week. While she waited alone in this dark, cold house, each day itself an eternity of hunger and loneliness and suffering!
A hollow laugh escaped her lips as she glanced at the money and the valuables heaped on the chair beside her. They were as little use to her now as Midas’s gold. They would neither feed her nor keep her warm.
“There’s no use hoping for release by somebody else,” she told herself. “I’ll have to work out a way by myself. I’ll have to be a modern Count of Monte Cristo!”
She stood up and gathered her treasure together again into the bag and took the Chinese vase from the mantelpiece. Another tour of the room revealed the Whistler picture in a dark corner. With the aid of her half-burnt candle, she carried everything to the dining room and placed it all in a pile beside the silverware.
“I’ll hide the money inside my dress and the jewelry in my coat pocket. These other things I’ll drop into that wood-basket I saw in the kitchen.”
When she had finally completed her packing she sat down in the dining room to think.
“I believe I’ll try to get out the same way I got in,” she decided. “Because the glass is already broken in that window. All I’ll have to do will be to cut my way through the new boards which that caretaker—or whoever he was—hammered on last night.”
With this purpose in view, Mary Louise carried her candle into the kitchen. The drawer in the dresser revealed a poor selection of knives; it might take days to cut through a board with only these as tools. Nevertheless, she meant to try. Anything was better than idleness.