The noise beyond the door increased, and worried him, and he hurriedly sought the key where he usually carried it. The door could be, and had been, closed by a spring, but it needed that key to open it, as he had boastingly remembered. Unhappy lad! In not one of his many and ragged pockets could that key now be found! While in the great room beyond the noise grew loud, and louder, with each passing second and surely would soon be heard by all the house. Under the circumstances nobody would hesitate to break that hateful lock to learn the racket’s cause; yet what would happen to him when this was discovered?
What, indeed! Yet, strangely enough, in all his trepidation there was no thought of Dorothy.
CHAPTER X
OPEN CONFESSION IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL
A housemaid, passing through the disused “old laundry” on the ground floor, as a short-cut toward the newer one in a detached building, heard a strange noise in the drying-room overhead, and paused to listen. This was unusual. In ordinary the loft was never entered, nowadays, except by some slippered maid, or Michael with a trunk.
Setting down her basket of soiled linen she put her hands on her hips and stood motionless, intently listening. Dorothy? Could it be Dorothy? Impossible! No living girl could make all that racket; yet—was that a scream? Was it laughter—terror—wild animal—or what?
Away she sped; her nimble feet pausing not an instant on the way, no matter with whom she collided nor whom her excited face frightened, and still breathlessly running came into the great Assembly Hall. There Miss Tross-Kingdon had, by the advice of the Bishop, gathered the whole school; to tell them as quietly as she could of Dorothy’s disappearance and to cross-examine them as to what anyone could remember about her on the evening before.
For the sorrowful fact could no longer be hidden—Dorothy Calvert was gone and could not be found.