"Matter! I don't know what's the matter, but I am going to find out. Read this note. You didn't write that, now did you?" Jerry thrust the note into Anna's hands.
The room grew very still as she fastened her attention upon the communication, supposedly from herself.
"Of course I never wrote it." Anna looked up wonderingly. Almost instantly her expression changed to one of alarm. "There is no one living at 852 on our street," she asserted. "My landlady has not moved. I still live at 856. I haven't had any trouble. I came here dressed for the masquerade. I'm wearing a Kate Greenaway costume. See. She took the silk scarf from her head disclosing a Kate Greenaway cap.
"No one living there!" came in a breath of horror from Ronny. It was echoed by the other three Lookouts. "Then who wrote that note and what has happened to Marjorie?"
"I am going to find out pretty suddenly." Jerry sprang to her dress closet for her fur coat and overshoes. "Go and get ready to go over to that house, girls. One, two, three, four—We are five strong. Get your wraps and meet me downstairs. I am going to see if I can't find Leila and Vera. You had better wait for me here, Miss Towne. I'll be back directly."
Ten minutes later a bevy of white-faced girls met in the lower hall. Leila and Vera were among them. Jerry had met them just in the act of leaving for the gymnasium.
"I'd go for my car but if would take longer to get it than for us to walk. We must make all haste. Now I have an idea of my own about this. I am not far off the truth when I say the Sans are to blame for the whole thing. I would rather think it was they than that the note had been written by some unknown person." Leila's blue eyes were dark with emotion. "And that beloved child trotted blindly off by herself never dreaming that the note was a forgery. Well, I might have done the same."
"I think you are right, Leila. The Sans have planned some kind of seance at that empty house to scare Marjorie. Probably they have dressed up in some hideous fashion. They could easily get away with it on account of the masquerade. The sooner we get there the better. We may be able to catch them, unless they have got hold of her and hustled her off somewhere else." Ronny's voice was not quite steady on the last words.
The seven worried rescuers were now crossing the campus and making for the campus entrance nearest the direction of Miss Towne's boarding house. They were swinging along at a pace that would have done credit to an army detachment on a hike.
"She wouldn't stand for that. She would fight every inch of the ground before she would go a step with that gang." Jerry spoke with a confidence born of her knowledge of Marjorie.