Billie never remembers to this day how she got out of that awful place. Someway she half fell, half scrambled down the ladder, stumbled and fell and stumbled again in her mad rush across the pitch-black attic to the head of the stairs.
Then down, down, down, a countless number of stairs that came up and hit her in the face—down, down to the gymnasium where thousands of ghostly figures rushed at her——
“Oh, what could have happened to have frightened her so?” she heard a voice saying from a long, long distance, and she opened her eyes to find Laura’s white face bending anxiously over her while other white-faced girls stared at her pityingly.
She struggled to her feet, but her knees wavered so that she sat down again quite suddenly.
“What’s the matter with you all?” she asked, then as the memory of what had happened came back to her in a flood she shuddered and instinctively she looked down at her hands to see if they still held that piece of linen with the stains upon it.
“Oh, I remember,” she murmured, as though talking to herself. The girls were watching her anxiously. “I threw it away.”
“What, honey?” asked Laura gently.
“The blood-stained handkerchief!”
CHAPTER XV—A DISCOVERY
It took the other girls some time to get the whole story from Billie, but when she had stammered it out to them they broke into a babel of excited exclamations that threatened to bring one of the teachers to their hiding place.