"I'll just creep down and show him I've found him out," she said to herself. "What fun to take him by surprise!"
To put on dressing-gown and slippers was but the work of a few moments. Softly opening the bedroom door, she passed out on to the landing, and groping in the darkness until she found the rail of the banisters, she proceeded down the stairs.
How still and quiet the house seemed! Nothing broke the silence but the solemn "tick-tack" of the big clock in the hall, which had been ticking in the same sedate manner since the days when Elsie's grandmother had been a little girl. Feeling her way down the length of the hall, not without an occasional bump against chairs and other such obstacles, Elsie came to a little lobby or cloak-room, having at the farther end a half-glass door, which opened on the yard, and from which the tool-house was distant not more than a dozen paces. She quite expected to find this door open, and was surprised to discover that it was not only shut, but locked on the inside.
"What a beggar Brian is!" thought the girl. "He must have climbed out of his window, and come down the water-pipe, as he did one day last summer."
She laid her hand on the key, when a low growling noise gave her quite a little fright, until she remembered that it was the old clock in the hall preparing to strike—"clearing his throat," as Ida called the operation. The next moment the bell struck—
"Ting! ting!"
Elsie listened with a gasp of astonishment; the old clock ignored the halves and quarters, so the time must be two o'clock in the morning! She never remembered having been up so early or so late before, and the thought that she was wandering about the house at that unearthly hour made her feel quite queer.
"What can Brian be about?" she murmured. "He can't have been sitting up working till this time."
She turned the handle of the door, and stepped across the threshold. The cold night air made her shiver, the whir of the grindstone came clear and distinct from the tool-house, and the window still gleamed with the same subdued, ghostly light. Elsie had intended to rush across the flagstones, fling open the door, shout "Brian, go to bed!" and then herself beat a hasty retreat; but, just when she was on the point of doing so, she hesitated.
What if it shouldn't be Brian after all? And if it were not her cousin, who or what could be there in the tool-house turning the grindstone at two o'clock in the morning?