"Yes'm; I went upstairs just before you came in and I thought I heard a little noise from the end room."
"Then why didn't you look in? Was the door locked?"
"I don't know; I didn't try it. I was afraid that they might be dead."
"But you said that you heard a noise. Oh, Gretchen, you are a silly girl."
As she spoke Anstiss was wondering why she herself had not thought of the end room, since every corner of the house ought to have been thoroughly explored.
Then she ran upstairs to the top of the house, and then down the two or three steps to the end room, with five girls and Fidessa following her closely. She felt sure that she heard a noise from the direction of the room; nor was she wrong. Haleema, who had managed to keep herself awake amid all the discomforts of her position, was shouting at the top of her rather weak lungs. Yet she had made herself heard.
A glance around the small room and the sight of the broken glass on the floor outside showed Anstiss that the girls were in the closet. But here was a new difficulty. The door had shut with a spring that had locked it, and no one knew where the key could be found.
The fact, however, that they were discovered had restored the spirits of the girls inside the closet.
"Yes, we are starved," they admitted when questioned.
"Let's get a ladder, and send down a basket by a rope over the door," suggested Angelina; and before any one could object she had gone down to the kitchen. When she returned with a small basket containing three oranges and some slices of bread and butter, Anstiss praised her warmly for bringing just the right things. In her absence a ladder had been brought from a corner of the gymnasium, and it was very little work to lower the basket over the transom to the hungry girls within.