There were no small chairs about, however, and she was obliged to choose a bench.
“How are we to get it back again?” she asked, after Nance had clambered in, and Judy, halfway through, paused to consider this question.
“Hurry, the watchman,” hissed Nance, on the lookout at the door. “He’s coming down the side corridor.”
The next instant Judy had leaped into the room, and the three girls were tearing along the hall and up the steps, Judy leaving a trail of water behind her. The watchman had seen them. They could hear the beat of his steps on the cement floor as he ran. The fugitives reached the upper corridor just as he arrived at the first landing on the stairs.
“Kick off your pumps, Judy, and pick up your skirts. He’ll trace us by the wet trail if you don’t.”
Another dash and they were in their sitting room, the door locked behind them. Oh, blessed relief!
Judy, in her stocking feet, was holding up her skirts with both hands. Nance had seized one of the slippers and she thought that Molly had the other.
But the final excitement of that eventful night was veiled in mystery.
As they had burst into their sitting room, some one ran swiftly across the room, through the passage into Judy’s room and into the corridor. They dared not follow and run the risk of meeting the night watchman, probably standing at that moment at the end of the corridor trying to trace that path of water, which, thanks be to Nance’s prudence, ended there and was lost on the green strip of carpet.
Below in the Tower Room the windows of the casement flapped back and forth in the wind which was rising steadily, and on the path below stood that telltale bench.