“Don’t you understand? Won’t you understand? We have been robbed! B-u-r-g-l-a-r-s!” cried the other, spelling the terrible word letter by letter.
“Yes, that’s right. I used to—spell it—l-e-r-s. I spelled—‘Coleoptera’—with a K; and Mr. Brook nearly had a spasm. I—I—won’t do it again, I promise you.” Yawn.
“Goodness! She’s asleep already! I don’t believe she will remember one single thing of this in the morning. I wonder if I ought to tell Mother! But Roland is the one, I suppose; only—”
The thought entered the girl’s mind, what if she told nobody, but kept her knowledge to herself and watched for more evidence before she aroused the weary sleepers? Wouldn’t that be the more unselfish way? And if she were really in earnest about trying to be as noble as her mother desired, was not unselfishness a bottom principle, and might she not begin then as well as later?
She answered her own questioning by casting one more smiling glance upon the sleeper before her, and, by the light of the shaded lamp, which was always kept burning in the central hall from which all their bedrooms opened, making her way noiselessly back to her own apartment.
There she listened critically; but all was silent without, save for the peaceful sounds of insects in the trees and the plashing of the river at the foot of the bluff. Then she carefully dressed herself and sat down to await developments.
“Dear me! Nothing does happen, after all! And how cold it seems sitting about alone in the night-time! I—I believe I’ll just creep inside the bed covers and watch there! It would be safer as regards taking cold, and fan more comfortable!”
Deluded girl! As she crept into bed in her full, every-day attire, and the strength of her brave resolution, she put herself deliberately in temptation’s way. Nature revenged herself, and in less than three minutes the burglar watcher was as sound asleep as Beatrice across the hall. When she was aroused again the sunlight of another day shone through her little skylight, and Bonny was shouting from below stairs: “Hurrah! hurrah! Isabelle! Is-a-belle! Wake up and come down! Glory—magnificence—Hurry! No matter about clothes! Come!”
Next an onrush of small limbs up the winding staircase, and Robert bounded into the room to precipitate himself headlong upon his sister’s bed. “Why don’t you come, Belle? Here we’ve all been yelling at you like ever’thing! They’s— My jimminy, Belle! Do you go to bed with your clothes on? I bet, if my mother knew that, she’d punish you! Eh? What’s the matter? What makes you stare so?”
“Clothes? Why, is it morning?”