His heart ceased to beat: the catch was fastened. Someone, then, had discovered his absence! The house seemed to be dark and silent enough, but they were lying in wait for him inside!
Well, he was going on with it now. All that he wanted was the quiet and comfort of his room and to be warm and cosy again in bed. He was suddenly quite horribly tired. He pushed with his fingers between the ledges and found then that the catch was not securely fastened after all. The upper part of the window suddenly jerked upwards, moving awkwardly and with a creaking noise that he had not known before. He pulled himself on to the window-ledge, then very carefully let himself down on the other side. The first thing that he knew was that his feet touched a chair, and there had been no chair there before; then, that his fingers were rubbing against the corner of a table!
He was not in their own pantry, he was not in their own house! He had climbed in through the wrong window! And even as he realized this and moved in an agony of alarm back to climb out of the window again, his arm brushed the table again, he pushed something, and with the noise of the Niagara Falls a thousand times emphasized echoing in his ears, the china of all the pantries of heaven fell clattering to the ground.
V
After that things happened quickly. A light instantly cleaved the darkness, and he saw an open door, a candle held aloft, and the strangest figure holding it. At the same time a deep voice said:
“Stand just where you are! Move another step and I fire!”
“Don’t fire, please,” said Jeremy. “It’s only me!”
The figure confronting him was a woman’s. It was, in fact, quite easily to be recognized as that of Miss Lisbeth Mackenzie, who had lived next door to the Coles for years and years and years—ever since, in fact, Jeremy could remember—and waged, like Betsy Trotwood, incessant warfare on boys, butchers and others who walked across her lawn, whose only merit had been that she hated Aunt Amy, and told her so. She was an eccentric old woman, eccentric in manners, in habits and appearance, but surely never in her life had she looked so eccentric as she did now. With her white hair piled untidily on her head, her old face of a crow pallid behind her hooked and piercing nose, over her nightdress she had hurriedly gathered her bed-quilt—a coat, like Joseph’s, of many and varied colours—and on her feet were white woollen stockings.
In the hand that did not hold the candle she flourished a pistol that, even to Jeremy’s unaccustomed and childish eyes, was undoubtedly a very old and dusty one.
They must have been a queer couple to behold had there been any third person there to behold them: the small boy, dishevelled, hatless, his collar burst, his stockings down over his ankles, and the old woman in her patchwork quilt. Miss Mackenzie, having expected to behold a hirsute and ferocious burglar, was considerably surprised. She held the candle closer, then exclaimed: