It was stuffy and dusty there; the light filtered dimly through the diamond spaces, and the adventurer, crawling on hands and knees, bumped into a shadowy pile of flower-pots, sneezed violently and grovelled wrathfully among the ruins for at least five minutes, helplessly confused. Quite by accident she knocked her cobwebbed head against a narrow, outward swinging window, seized it thankfully, and plunged through it. Hanging a moment by her grimy hands she swayed, a little fearfully, then dropped with a quick breath to the concrete floor beneath, and smiled with relief as the comparative brightness of a well kept cellar revealed her safety. Vegetable bins, a neat pile of kindling wood, a large portable closet of wire netting, with occasional plates and covered dishes suggestively laid away in it, met her eye; on the floor in front of this last rested a little heap of something wet and glistening. Untidy as it looked, it had an eatable appearance to Caroline, whose instinct in these matters was unimpeachable, and bending over it she inserted one finger.
"Current jelly!" she whispered, thoughtfully licking the inquiring member. "The idea!"
She approached the wire closet and peered along the shelves; there was no jelly there.
"'Dropped it getting it out," she pursued, "I wonder why Selma didn't wipe it up."
Suddenly her face brightened.
"We'll keep right on and pretend 'twas burglars," she announced to the quiet cellar, "and they stole the jelly in a hurry and dropped this and never noticed, and went upstairs to eat it and get the silver! And so I found 'em, after all!"
Still on tiptoe, she left the cellar, stole through the laundry, and crept mysteriously up the back stairs. So absorbed she was that a cracking board stopped her heart for a breath, and a slip on the landing sent her to her knees in terror. The empty quiet seemed to hum around her; strange snappings of the old woodwork dried her throat. With her hand on the swing door that led into the dining-room, she paused in a delicious ecstasy of terror, as the imagined clink of glass and silver, the normal clatter of a cheerful meal, seemed to echo in the air.
It was always difficult for Caroline in such moments of excitement to distinguish between what she saw and heard and what she wished to see and hear, and at this ghost of table music she smiled with pleasure.
"The house is empty," said her common-sense, but she pursed her lips and whispered, "they're up here eating—they've come for the silver!"
By fractions of inches she pushed the door on its well-oiled hinge and slipped noiselessly into the dining-room.