And one day she did! She waved to him from the tower window. Finally he understood, from the motion of her hand, that she wanted to come down—and couldn’t. The door locked from the outside, and her tiny key was of no use from within. Clutching it in her hand, she leaned farther and farther out of the tower window.
Just like the princess in Tom’s old fairy book. He would be the brave knight and rescue her. There was a rope in the car. It had been used as a towing rope but would now serve a nobler purpose.
He swung one end of it up to the tower; he saw the slim white hand reach out and grasp it, the lithe body throw itself over the window sill and descend—slowly, slowly. She was almost to the ground when the rope came loose from where she had fastened it.
She fell!
Quick as a flash, Tom Lang caught her in his strong young arms. That same day he made her his bride. She lived just long enough to bear him a little daughter, the image of herself. Heartbroken, Irene’s father had never spoken of her. But he had saved her golden wedding dress and on Irene’s seventeenth birthday sent it to her with a letter explaining his gift and enclosing the key to her tower room. His Annie had been just seventeen.
“Romantic, wasn’t it?” Arthur asked after Horace had told the story as only a reporter could tell it.
Judy, who had listened to it all without making any comment, admitted that it was the most romantic true story she had ever heard.
“But Mr. Lang didn’t give Irene the name or address,” Arthur said thoughtfully. “He only sent the key to her mother’s room because he wanted her to have it as a remembrance. In fact, he told so little in his letter that it seems impossible—unthinkable—that she could have found her grandmother——”
“Unless she found the same description somewhere else,” Judy interrupted.