Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/56



is pleasant to be able to record that Jane, alone in the dark with a wildly painful ankle at the foot of the stairs down which she had just pitched head first, on hearing that scream and knowing all too well the accents of Lucilla in terror, did, in spite of the pain and the ankle and the darkness, hoist herself on hands and one knee, the other foot dragging red-hot behind her, to the top of the stairs. Just so, and not otherwise, had Lucilla screamed one night at school when Daisy Simmons, the school's incomparable ninny, had put a sheet over her head and pretended to be a ghost, gliding up to a sponge-and-towel-laden Lucilla coming all glowing and fearless from the bathroom. After that Lucilla had fainted. Suppose she fainted now—alone in that dark house? The thought was enough to nerve our Jane to effort. But at the top of the stairs the most extraordinary sensation caught her. A curious feeling like flying—a creeping sensation at the back of the neck—a fancy that the ivy-green window was going round slowly but indubitably—these warned her. She sat down on the top step and shut her eyes.

"If you think," she spoke silently to the universe, "if you think that I'm going to faint, I'm not. I must find out what has happened to Lucy. I shall shut my eyes and go on in a minute." So she shut her eyes. But she did not go on.

What had happened to Lucilla is soon told. With her heart, as they say, in her mouth, she climbed the steep stairs, went along the corridor, and, feeling her way, went more