“Oh, Fanny,” he said, “if you are going to the kitchen, won’t you please send Mark up with a wrench, file and screw-driver? I am going to open the chest.”
Sherry’s impulse to speak of the key left her suddenly, as she thought she would probably be questioned as to how she knew it was there, and, bowing to Alex., she went to the kitchen and found the file and wrench, but not Mark, the boy of all work.
“I’ll take them myself,” she said, and, returning with them, she met Amy in the hall just going to the attic and gave them to her.
Her head was still aching, and she had that strange feeling or fatigue she had felt in the early morning.
“I’ll rest a minute,” she thought, sitting down in her room near the open door, where she could hear distinctly what was said in the attic.
Ruth Doane was saying to Amy: “I was right when I thought I heard some one up here last night dragging something on the floor. The chest has been moved from the wall.”
“No!” Amy exclaimed in surprise, while Sherry felt as if a heavy blow had been struck her. Her dream was true in part.
She had not seen her grandmother, but she had been in the attic. The habit of her childhood, which she hoped she had outgrown, had come back, and she knew why she felt so weak and depressed. She had always felt this way after walking in her sleep. She had dreaded these fits of somnambulism, and rejoiced when they left her, and she could not understand why they had returned, unless induced by the unusual strain upon her nerves since coming to Maplehurst and from thinking so much of the chest.
“Yes, it was that,” she said to herself. “It was in my mind when I went to sleep, and that is why I got up. I must have had a great deal of strength to move that chest. But it seems I did it. I was always strong when I was in this sleep. Did I really find the key, and where did I put it if I did? I used to hide things. Oh, this is dreadful!”
In a dazed kind of way she began to look for the key, a cold, clammy sweat breaking out through every pore when she found it in her work-box. For a moment she recoiled from it as from something uncanny, then, picking it up, she whispered: “I must take it to them and tell them, and that it is my great-grandmother’s chest.”