He listened for a minute, and then went softly down-stairs to get the keys of the observatory, and go out. But as he took them from the nail in the little hall, he felt that if he opened the door, the shooting of the bolts would alarm Mrs Fidler and the maids, so he stole back to his room, closed the door, listened again at his window, and became sure that some one was in the mill-yard.
“It’s Pete Warboys,” he said to himself as he listened. “What mischief is he after now?”
It was too dark to make out anything with his eyes; but his ears maintained that something was going on, and a sudden chill of horror and dismay ran through Tom.
“He’s going to smash the new speculum out of spite for the thrashing he got,” muttered Tom; and nerved now by his indignant excitement, he let himself down from the window, and began to cross the garden without a sound, thinking as he went of the position.
“He couldn’t get in at the door,” he said, “without a strong crow-bar, and the windows are now all strongly fastened. Perhaps after all it’s a mistake.”
But all the same there was a feeling troubling Tom which made him determined to thoroughly make sure that no midnight marauder was about, bent upon destroying the piece of optical work which had been made with so much care.
He crept out silently, and across the lane, raised the key to open the yard gate, but replaced it in his pocket, walked a few yards, and, with the intention of not alarming the visitor, softly began to scale the wall, and did the very thing he wished to avoid, for as he passed over the wall on one side of the mill, a dark figure passed over it on the other side, with the difference that as Tom went in the figure went out, and stood peeping over.
Stooping low Tom crept up to the doorway and found it fast, tried one window, the one that had been before opened, and found it quite right. Then going round to the back, he found the other window was in the same condition.
“Nothing wrong,” he said to himself, as he went on silently round the mill, looking upwards at the first storey windows, and then he came to a sudden stoppage, having struck against something in his way, and pretty well invisible in the darkness.
Then Tom’s heart began to beat again heavily, for his hands, which flew up, were resting upon one side of a long, slight, fruit-gathering ladder—one of those which sprawl out widely at the foot, and run up very narrow at the top, a form which makes them safe from tilting sidewise, and so balanced that they are easy to carry about from place to place.