Paulina quickly took hold of it with interest. “One o’ your ma’s dresses that she was some sort of a furriner with. Somebody else has been into the trunks, then!”
“I’m terribly disappointed, Paulina, for I thought that we would surely find her, after I knew that she had gone after her costume. Then I thought that she would stay in the house. I want to tell you, Paulina, that I went to the room where Hepsy and Vittoria sleep and that Hepsy is alone.”
Paulina, stiff and dour, gave Jannet a look of understanding and nodded her head. “It may be,” she said.
CHAPTER XVII
THE SECRET ROOM
Dawn was breaking when Paulina left the two girls, telling Jannet that she intended to watch for the return of Vittoria. Jannet persuaded Nell to lie down on her bed, but she was too highly keyed over the whole affair to feel sleepy. At a suitable time she would call Uncle Pieter and tell him about the discovery. Meanwhile she would go by herself to investigate that queer little box of a room.
Nell went soundly to sleep in a few minutes, feeling perfectly safe from ghosts now in Jannet’s room. Jannet sat quietly at her desk until she was quite assured that Nell was asleep. Then she rose, picked up her flashlight and the “darling” candlestick with its white candle which always stood upon her mantel, a few matches upon its base, and started for the attic stairway rather than going by the panel. It might waken Nell.
The door of the attic stood open. Paulina, the neat, careful Paulina, had been too much excited to think of closing it! The trap door so near the partition also stood open. Jannet peered at a crack in the rough partition. Yes, there was the outline of where the top of the secret room stood above the attic floor on the other side of the partition. A pile of lumber, a few odds and ends of boards, rafters and even a few bricks were cleverly arranged to give the impression of waste material and nothing important, should anyone be curious enough to peep through. Now, where below was there room for the rest of the secret chamber? But Jannet recalled the long flight of stairs to the attic. Ceilings were high in the old house. She recalled, too, that the smooth ceilings of her closet and the one corresponding to it were quite low, perhaps to conceal any evidence of the circular stairs. The few steps down from the attic floor accounted for the secret room below such part of it as was raised above the attic floor, its outlines concealed.
Jannet could see a glimmer of light from the outside, when she looked down into the dark well where the ladder led to the ground floor at the very wall of the house. She recalled little jogs and irregularities downstairs, but could not place this for a moment. Yet from some cracks somewhere the morning sunlight came dimly through.
“The queer little tool house!” she suddenly thought. She had wondered why in the world that had been inserted in a brick wall. It was shallow and Jannet remembered a sort of rude table that stood against its back wall, “probably concealing the entrance to this secret way,” with its queer ladder nailed to the wood of the enclosure.
How thrilling it was! Cousin Diana, when she showed Jannet around had mentioned the tool house and let Jannet peep within when they came to it. “When the wings were built on, this was naturally sealed in,” Cousin Diana had said, “but when Pieter took them away, he painted up the quaint entrance with its odd latch and open lattice.” Perhaps the very ease of entering the tool house would make no one suspect a concealed ascent behind it.