“Did you not hear some one at the door?” she whispered.
“No; I heard nothing,” Brownie replied, yet bending her head to listen.
“There is surely some one there,” persisted Mrs. Coolidge. “I forgot to unlock Isabel’s door, and the key is in my pocket. Wait just a moment while I go and unfasten it.”
She glided swiftly by the young girl, holding her breath and watching her narrowly with her basilisk eyes, passed through the narrow door, drew it hastily after her, and shoved the bolt, leaving the astonished and dismayed girl a close prisoner in that dismal cell.
All too late, Brownie saw how she had been fooled and entrapped, and berated herself soundly for having trusted the faithless woman for an instant.
After the first surprise was over, she looked about her to measure the dimensions of her prison.
It could not have been more than eight feet by six, and was lighted only by that one small window set so high in the wall that it was impossible to look out. There was no sign of any other door or mode of egress that she could discover, only the bare, damp walls of solid stone.
There was not an article of furniture in the place, and Brownie groped her way to the wall, leaning against it for support, for she was excited and trembling at finding herself so cleverly entrapped and shut up from the light of day.
“I suppose she thinks to frighten me into submission by shutting me up like a naughty child,” she said, with curling lips and flashing eyes. “But she will find she has ‘reckoned without her host,’ for only one stronger than I shall ever get these precious jewels away from me again. Oh, auntie,” she added, a moment after, “you little knew what a troublesome legacy you were giving me; were they not sacred to me on your account, they are not worth all this trouble and contention. But they shall not have them now.”
She walked to the door and rapped upon it.