“It was possible for one of them to get into the window, I suppose,” answered Jannet, “and you remember that there was a short time before we got to their door. Jan could have let himself down from the balcony and gotten into his own window in a jiffy. Perhaps he could have thrown the light on the wall in some way, and he certainly could have made those noises, only I scarcely see how they could have come from the direction they seemed to come from unless Jan knows how to throw his voice.”
“I’m sure that he doesn’t,” said Nell. “I think that it was Paulina!”
“That could be,” said Jannet. “She looked awfully queer, and she had heard it all, and she wanted us to think that it was ‘Her.’ But I can’t imagine why she would do it. She is so mortally sensible and matter-of-fact about everything else.”
“That’s the very kind,” insisted Nell. “I don’t think that Paulina is so very smart; besides, Jan and Chick say that she is ‘queer in the bean’.”
Jannet laughed at this expression. “That sounds like Jan. He has all sorts of slang for every occasion. But I’m not so sure. Paulina may have been scared by things like this long before any of us came here, and you know how stories grow. I’m going to talk to Paulina myself. I’m not going to let this go and not try to find out about it. I may talk to Uncle Pieter, too, but not yet.”
“Your courage is not quite up to that yet?” laughed Nell.
“Not quite, Nell.”
The girls did not have a chance to see how the boys looked and acted that morning, for Paulina called them so late that they missed the boys altogether. Chick had gone home, to meet Jan at the train later, and Mrs. Holt had driven off with Jan, intending to do some errands for him before he started back to school. The maid who helped Paulina gave Nell and Jannet a good breakfast, after which Nell rode home, warning Jannet in farewell not to “do anything rash.”
Jannet, bare-headed, stood in the rear of the house, waving goodbye to Nell. Then she slowly sauntered up the path which led to the pergola, under her own windows and those of the room in front. “I’m going in there first,” she said to herself.
Accordingly, she decided to get permission from headquarters, and as she had seen her uncle go into the house a short time before, she crossed the court to the rear of the new building and entered it. Her uncle was just coming out of his library when she met him.