The next few minutes were most engaging, for Jan showed his cousin how one portion of a panel apparently dropped down into the floor and made a low opening large enough for one person to enter from the hall into the room. “Mercy, Jan, I’ll never sleep in peace now, if there are two ways of getting in beside the door!”
“Put bolts on ’em, Jannet. I’ll fix it.”
“Ask Uncle Pieter first, Jan. Then I’ll be glad to have you do it. But I want it kept possible to open in this way. It’s so thrilling, you know.”
“Yes, isn’t it? But it is hard to forgive you, Jannet, for finding this out about the secret room first.”
“I only followed the ghost, Jan. But you don’t know how I wondered what the secret was that you had with Paulina, and oh, did you send a little message to your mother by Paulina that you were home?”
“Yes, how did you know that?”
“Oh, I just remember that your mother read something and looked as cross as she ever looks and she was a little embarrassed, I thought, when she excused herself. And then you came just as if you had just arrived, and told me a whopper about coming from Chick’s!”
“That was no whopper. I had come. I rode over there early, but of course it wasn’t the first time I had come from there.”
The matter of his early appearance at this time had also to be explained, but Jan related how school was closing early and how he and Chick decided not to wait a minute after examinations if they could get permission to leave, from parents and school authorities. “Think of all that was going on at the farm and I missing it! Mother expected me this time, but I wrote her to let me surprise you.”
It occurred to Jannet that she had not had anything to eat, and she felt a little faint, to her own surprise. “What’s the matter, Jannet?” asked Jan, suddenly noticing how she looked.