Finally Aunt Lorena said it was time for us all to go to bed, and when grandmother protested, she reminded her how weary we were from our long journey. So old Martha was called for grandmother, and Semmy was called for me, and we all went off to our rooms. I had to laugh a little—at least, I think I laughed, but maybe I cried, too—to think of my little loft at home, and the pieces of round tin nailed over the mouse holes. And then to look around at this new room of mine!
The bed was soft as down, and scented with lavender, and there was an eiderdown comfort to snuggle under. It was such a wonderful bed that I couldn’t go to sleep for thinking about it, but lay awake for a long time, as I never had done in my little loft. There was much to think over, Carin—so much. And always I kept wondering: “Have I done right? Is this going to help me weave my silver web?”
I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I heard, without hearing, a certain little soft, stealthy sound for several seconds before I realized that something unusual was happening. Then, when that fact really came to me, I sat up in bed to listen.
Someone, it was evident, was stealing along the hall. Then I heard the soft, creeping steps down the stairs, and after a while a door opened—a little door right beneath my window.
I slipped out of bed and looked from my window, and I could see a little white figure gliding away from the house. It was no larger than that of a child, but the motions it made were not a child’s, and that is how I came to know that it was grandmother. I couldn’t think it right for her to be going out into the garden in the middle of the night in her night clothes, so I ran down the stairs. I found the little door opened from a cloak room, and I stumbled out into the darkness after her. But it was very dark and I did not know the garden, so in a few moments I found myself quite hopelessly lost amid the hedges. I was afraid something dreadful might happen if I wasted any more time, so I got back to the house, and ran upstairs to try to find Aunt Lorena’s room.
But all of the bedroom doors in the house have shutters to them, and these shutters were closed, so I could not possibly tell which rooms were occupied and which were not, and all I could do was to run up and down, knocking at each one and calling:
“Oh, Aunt Lorena, Uncle David, come!”
It was like a horrible nightmare. It seemed as if more doors kept coming into existence right there before my eyes. The place was so dark—I had no idea where to find the electric buttons—that if the doors had not been white I could not have seen them at all. Truly, Carin, it was the most frightening thing that ever happened to me.
But I hear the dinner gong. I will send this off, there is so much of it, and to-morrow I will write you again.
Your own