“Please give me my trou—”
He was on the other side of the door before the second syllable came, and the click of the latch told him that after all he might save his breath.
Heathcote was in a predicament. The corridor was dark, and draughty, and he was far from home; what was he to do? “Three courses,” as the wise man says, “were open to him.” Either he might camp out where he was, and by the aid of door-mats and carpet extemporise a bed till the morning; or he might commence a demonstration against the door from which he had just been ejected till somebody came and saw him into his rights—or, failing his rights, into his trousers; or he might commence a house-to-house canvass, up one side of the corridor and down the other, in hopes of finding either an empty chamber or one tenanted by a friend.
There was a good deal to be said for each, though on the whole he personally inclined to the last course. Indeed he went so far as to grope his way to the end of the passage with a view to starting fair, when a sound of footsteps and a white flutter ahead sent his heart to his mouth, and made him shiver with something more than the evening breeze.
He stood where he was, rooted to the spot, and listened. An awful silence seemed to fall upon the place. Had he hit on the Templeton ghost?—on the disembodied spirit of some luckless martyr to the ferocity of a last century bully? Or, was it an ambuscade prepared for himself? or, was it some companion in—
Yes! there was a sob, and Heathcote’s soul rejoiced as he recognised it.
“Is that you, young ’un?” he said in a deep whisper.
The footsteps suddenly ceased, the white flutter stopped, and next moment there rose a shriek in the still night air which made all Westover’s jump in its sleep, and opened, as if by magic, half the doors in the long corridor. Aspinall had seen a ghost!
Amid all the airily-clad forms that hovered out to learn the cause of the disturbance, Heathcote felt comforted. His one regret was that he was unable to recognise his friend the junior, in whose debt he was in nocturnal garb; but he recognised Dick to his great delight, and hurriedly explained to him as well as to about fifty other enquirers, the circumstances—that is, so much of them as seemed worth repetition.
Between them they contrived to reassure the terrified Aspinall, who, it turned out, had been the victim of a similar trick to that played on Heathcote.