“What special kind of prince were you, Bobbs?” he asked jovially. “I did not know they hid in dark attics.”
“Oh, yes they did,” contradicted Ted. “Don’t you remember the princes in the tower?”
“I don’t, but it doesn’t matter. They must have been in a tower or you would not have included the fact in your college course,” replied Jerry, always ready to tease on that score. Whenever Ted found a new specimen in the woods, or questioned about a strange bird, he would invariably ascribe the matter to “her college course.”
Nora was anxious to get out of the ill-fated costume. She wanted to run upstairs and change, now that her knees had stopped shaking, but Ted insisted she take her supper just as she was, and readily made a merry time out of the near catastrophe. Again Nora missed the point—no sense of humor was a sad lack in so active a girl.
Cap regarded her with an eye almost twinkling. Did he know the attic secret that she had been unable even to realize was a secret?
“Your clothes fit pretty well,” said Jerry, “but I think I like you best in your Little Girl Blue dress. Guess, after all, girls really shouldn’t wear——”
“Now, there you go again, Jerry Manton,” interrupted Ted. “As if the costume had anything to do with Nora getting lost.”
And all the while Nora was thinking: “If they only knew.” But she had never had any one to confide in, except Barbara, and now she did not know exactly how to tell her story. Besides, how silly it would be to say she had actually been out in the roadway in the Fauntleroy clothes? And if they ever knew she had been seen and spoken to by a Girl Scout!
The fear of humiliation crushed back any desire to tell the whole story and so it remained as it appeared, an incident of no more importance than a case of being lost in the attic.
All the horrors of the black hole, all the terrors of her fright and faintness, besides what actually happened when she finally burst through that door and all but fell head-long down the dark stairs—this Nora crushed back from her lips, and only dared to think of it as something she would write in her secret diary.