Page:The Strand (Volume 73).pdf/51

Rh Having reached it she sat back a little bit blankly and frowned. The trap-door was closed.

Betsy set to work upon it in a neat, thorough, and concentrated way. She had soon proved to her complete conviction, if not satisfaction, that the door to the roof was rightly closed, adjusted, and fastened. No doubt the ladder clung unctuously to its wall.

"Cecily!" Betsy bawled, setting her face close to the trap-door. And "Cecily!" she shouted again.

There was never a sound.

Betsy leant back against a slope and looked at the watch on her arm. She frowned, then she laughed. "Serves me right," she said. Then she gazed thoughtfully at the sky.

What had happened was clear enough; Cecily, unaware of her presence on the roof, had tidied up the door and ladder and gone off to the art class she always attended on Monday mornings. Betsy's nimble and silent climb to the roof had not betrayed her to Cecily. Moreover, she—Betsy—had sewed on for half an hour instead of a minute or two. Also it was quite likely Cecily had not heard her reluctant consent to explore, and believed she was hard at it copying out that beastly music, and not to be disturbed.

A survey of the sky did not offer any way of escape. It was growing a bit misty.

"Lovely if a fog came on!" murmured Betsy. She laughed. Then she gave a little shiver. This wasn't sitting-on-roofs weather.

"Must do something," she thought. But what? She considered.

She could think of no way of return to the house she had left. Its lower floors were let as offices. Its two upper floors made a maisonnette, cut off from the remainder of the house by a locked door, and shared by Cecily and herself. Only Cecily could enter the maisonnette, and Cecily was off to the Art School.

"But there must be some way of leaving this roof," Betsy thought, with a gleam in her eye, "or it wouldn't be much of an escape from fire."

She was right. There were ways of leaving it. On the left, for instance, one could pass on to the next roof, which was on the same level and no doubt served by a trap-door, and from that to the next, and so on. But she would still be "on the roof."