However, a snore from the bed explained why. "Mrs. Denim" was asleep and the "long boy" was invisible. At the foot of the stairs, Dorothy hesitated. Wasn't this a chance to steal away and start for home? Once out of this house and on some road, she would meet people who would direct her. She had heard her father say, time and time again, that the world was full of kindness; and, though her present circumstances seemed to contradict this statement, she was anxious to believe it true. But, as she stood there debating whether she dare run away in the darkness or wait until daylight, the sleepless Tiger gave a vicious growl and bounded in from the shed where he had lain.
That settled it. With a leap as swift as his own Dorothy sped back over the stairs and flung herself on the "shake-down" where she had been told to sleep; and again silence, broken only by its mistress's snores, fell upon this lonely cottage in the fields.
Dorothy's own sleep was fitful. This low room under the eaves was close and warm. Her head ached strangely, and her throat was sore. At times she seemed burning up with fever, and the next instant found herself shaking with the cold. She roused, at length, from one disturbed nap to hear the sound of wheels creaking heavily over rough ground, and to see the attic dimly lighted.
"Can it be morning already? Is that woman going to market and not taking me, after all I begged her so?" cried the girl aloud and, hurrying from the bed to the low window, looked out.
It was the light of a late-rising moon that brightened the scene and there was slowly disappearing in the distance one of those curious, schooner-shaped vehicles which truck-farmers use: and with a vain belief that she could overtake it, Dorothy again rushed down the stairs and plump upon the mastiff crouched on the floor below, and evidently on guard.
But, yawning and stretching his long limbs, there just then entered the shock-headed youth; and his "Pshaw!" Dorothy's "O-Oh!" and Tiger's growl made a trio of sounds in the silent house: to which he promptly added his question:
"Yes, yes! But I want to go with that woman! Call off the dog—I must go—I must!"
The boy did call the dog to him and laid his hand upon the creature's collar; then he said:
"I'm glad of it."