Page:Betty Gordon at Boarding School.djvu/177

Rh "I must be going crazy," she cried in despair. "I couldn't have dreamed those tools fell down, and yet where could they have gone? There's no hole in the floor——"

Now Betty's nerves were sorely tried by the lonely imprisonment, the bad air, the heat, and the darkness, and it is not to be wondered at that her usual sound common sense was tricked by her imagination. Her fancy suggested that the weight of the tools might have torn a hole in the floor, they might have dropped through to the roof, and Betty herself might be in momentary danger of stepping into this hole.

Nonsense? Well, wiser minds have conceived wilder possibilities under similar trying conditions.

"I won't walk another step!" cried poor Betty, as she visioned this yawning hole. "Not another step. I'll wait till it's light."

But she waited, fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, and the darkness if anything grew blacker. She had no idea how long she had been locked in the room, and she could not calculate how far off the morning might be.

"I'll put my hands out before me and creep," she said finally. "That ought to be safe. Perhaps I can find something to stand on to reach that window. I guess I could drop to the roof from there."