"He may be afraid of the uniform," sniffed Mollie scathingly. "But he certainly couldn't be afraid of you."
"Now you don't mean that, you know you don't," laughed Roy, drawing her down beside him on the couch and holding her there with an iron grip of his brown fingers. "Say you didn't, like a pretty little girl, and I'll let you go."
"I won't say any such--" Mollie began, then suddenly her gaze stiffened into such a stare of wonder, and even alarm, that it made the girls fairly hold their breath.
"Mollie, what is it?" demanded Roy commandingly.
"Over there!" she shrieked. "At the window, Roy! Do you see it?"
Chapter XXII
Tragedy
There, pressed so close to the pane of the window that the nose was flattened grotesquely, eyes wildly staring, hair disheveled, was a face that even in that tense moment the girls recognized--the face of Professor Dempsey!
It took the boys perhaps a second to fling out of the room, jump down the steps of the porch and circle the house to the window.
And yet, in that second, the man was gone, leaving no more trace than if the earth had opened and swallowed him up. For almost an hour the boys searched the woods about the lodge, refusing to allow the girls to accompany them, saying truly that they would hamper them more than they could help.