The little girl padded out of her room and along the hall to the front of the house. Nobody heard her as she descended the front stairs.
Dot came to the foot of the stairs, where a single dim gaslight flickered. She pushed open the dining room door.
As she did so, there sounded the faint clink, clink, clink of metal against metal. A spotlight flashed and roved around the room—touching ceiling and walls and floor in its travels. But it did not reveal her figure just inside the door.
She saw no good Kris Kringle standing on the hearth, with his bag of toys. Nothing but a broken brick lay there—probably loosened by Sammy Pinkney in his course down the chimney-well the previous afternoon.
There was a shadowy figure—she could not see its face—stooping over a cloth laid upon the floor; and upon that cloth was stacked much of the choice old silver which Uncle Rufus always packed away so carefully after using in the locked safe in the butler’s pantry.
CHAPTER III—DOROTHY’S BURGLAR
Dot Kenway had heard about burglars. That is, she knew there were such people. Just why they went about “burgling,” as she herself phrased it, the smallest Corner House girl did not understand.
But she thought, with a queer jumping at her heart, that she had found a “really truly” burglar now.
He was just putting their very best sugar-bowl on the top of the pile of other silver, and she expected to see him tie up the cloth by its four corners preparatory to taking it away.
Dot really did not know what she ought to do. Of course, she might have screamed for Ruth; but then, she knew that Ruthie would be awfully scared if she did.