"It wasn't at this window," Julia declared, in muffled tones. "What a nuisance you are, Isabella."
Then in an instant she flung off her sleep and was out of bed. "It must have been at Mrs Ragg's," she said. "I am going to see."
Shivering, I followed to the landing. The light no longer showed from Mrs Ragg's door, but the door itself was still ajar. Julia rapped sharply upon it and called the caretaker's name. When no one answered, she pushed the door wide, and we saw, by the light of the candle I carried, that the room was empty.
I scarcely knew why the fact that it was so filled us both with such dismay. Our faces were white in the candlelight as we looked blankly at each other; then, seizing hands, we scurried back to Julia's room. A rush of cold air met us on the landing and our light went out.
"An outer door is open," Julia said.
We shut and locked our own door and stood together in the darkness, gripping each other, intently listening.
Julia's senses are sharper than mine. "Someone is in the garden—at the back," she whispered. "I can hear footsteps—footsteps of more than one person. What shall we do, Isabella? I don't know yet what we ought to do."
Presently we were kneeling at the window. The moon had set, the night was quite dark. By degrees, straining our eyes in desperate anxiety, we made out the stunted form of a shrub or two planted opposite the house; we knew that the blackness of shadow at our left was the shed whose key had been lost.
As we looked, the shed door opened. We knew it by the light which suddenly streamed upon the night. It was the light from a lantern held high, a light flickering and uncertain. It blinked and trembled and swayed as if held in a shaking hand. We knew whose was the lean, lank figure, fitfully revealed, which held it.
"What can she be doing there?" we asked of each other, with chattering teeth, simultaneously.