Anstiss had already started toward the door. "Yes'm; I went upstairs just before you came in and I thought I heard a little noise from the end room." "Then why didn't you look in? Was the door locked?" "I don't know; I didn't try it. I was afraid that they might be dead." "But you said that you heard a noise. Oh, Gretchen, you are a silly girl." As she spoke Anstiss was wondering why she herself had not thought of the end room, since every corner of the house ought to have been thoroughly explored. Then she ran upstairs to the top of the house, and then down the two or three steps to the end room, with five girls and Fidessa following her closely. She felt sure that she heard a noise from the direction of the room; nor was she wrong. Haleema, who had managed to keep herself awake amid all the discomforts of her position, was shouting at the top of her rather weak lungs. Yet she had made herself heard. A glance around the small room and the sight of the broken glass on the floor outside showed Anstiss that the girls were in the closet. But here was a new difficulty. The door had shut with a spring that had locked it, and no one knew where the key could be found. The fact, however, that they were discovered had restored the spirits of the girls inside the closet. "Yes, we are starved," they admitted when questioned. "Let's get a ladder, and send down a basket by a rope over the door," suggested Angelina; and before any one could object she had gone down to the kitchen. When she returned with a small basket containing three oranges and some slices of bread and butter, Anstiss praised her warmly for bringing just the right things. In her absence a ladder had been brought from a corner of the gymnasium, and it was very little work to lower the basket over the transom to the hungry girls within. They had hardly finished their repast when the diners-out returned, and when they heard of the disturbance upstairs Miss South hastened at once to the scene. "Why, no," she said, "I haven't a key; it is strange that that should have been a spring latch, for there's nothing very valuable in the closet. We did not intend to keep it fastened. There are many things of my grandmother's in these trunks, and though we knew that no one would meddle with them, we meant to keep them locked, as well as the door of this room. I was up here myself just before I went out, and I fear that I must have left the door open." Not a word thus far of reproof for the meddlesome girls within the closet, although Miss South saw plainly that one trunk, if no more, had been ransacked. A minute later Julia and Pamela appeared with the small tool-chest that was kept in the hall closet on the first floor, and then, to every one's astonishment, Miss South herself set to work upon the latch in the deftest possible way, and in a minute the lock was off and the door open.