And it was then that she determined to try an experiment.
One bleak autumn afternoon a thick, wet mist rolled in from the ocean and enveloped the town of West Haven so densely that it seemed like a city floating on a bank of cloud. Only the dim outline of objects twenty yards away could be seen and the muffled call of the fog horn at the lighthouse on the Black Reefs sounded its dismal warning through the mist.
Billie and Mary were hurrying arm in arm down the street in earnest conversation. Notwithstanding it was after school hours, they were going toward the High School.
“Do you think we can get it, Mary?” Billie was saying.
“Oh, yes, the janitor always leaves the door to the basement corridor open until evening for Miss Gray and the teachers who sometimes stay late.”
“It was stupid of me to have left that horrid old algebra, but you know I always forget the things I don’t like. If Miss Finch hadn’t called me down so thoroughly this morning about my average in mathematics, I would just let the lesson for to-morrow go, or if Miss Finch were only Miss Allbright, or Miss anybody else but just a stern, animated mathematical cube.”
“She’s all right if you know your lessons,” said Mary, smiling. “It’s only the ones who don’t study hard enough to suit her who call her a human arithmetic.”
The door to the corridor was open, as Mary had predicted, and the girls entered, their footsteps resounding with a hollow echo through the empty place.
“‘I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted,’” quoted Billie. “Could anything be more ghostly than a deserted school?”
“It’s not deserted,” said Nancy. “I heard voices somewhere, I am certain of it, just as you opened the door.”