Joey redoubled her efforts, and a tile went at last. She could hear it fall on to the ground below. One gone--perhaps the next would be easier. She dropped her tired arms for a moment to rest them, and in that moment the big clock struck two. Only half an hour to the time the match would start--that gave her a fresh sense of urgent need of haste. She smashed furiously at the roof, and her shoe went through it and stuck so fast that she nearly came off the narrow shelf in her effort to dislodge it. In spite of her anxiety and her aching arms, she had to giggle at the thought of how absurd a shoe must look from below, sticking up through a hole in the roof. It came away at last, and something happened at the same moment: there were steps outside and the key turned in the lock--somebody was coming in. Joey shouted at the full pitch of her lungs, as she tumbled down recklessly from the shelf and hopped across the broken glass to the door. "Oh, let me out! I'm shut in." There was an exclamation, and the voice of Frances, the superior parlour-maid who had opened the door to Joey on her arrival, called, "There, Miss Tiddles! You were right--she _was_ here." A key slipped about in the lock of the closet door. "Miss Jocelyn, what have you done with the key?" Frances demanded. Hope died in Joey's heart. "The Professor took it." "I think he's just gone," Frances said. "I'll try this key again; the locks are nearly the same." "Oh, Frances, do try, like a brick!" poor Joey cried in a frenzy. The Professor only just gone; there might be time to stop him yet. Fennell the gardener was a large man, and he was probably somewhere about the place. The key rattled, half-turned, stopped. "Bother!" cried Frances. "Run, Miss Tiddles, there's a dear, and see if the Professor's gone yet." Wonder of wonders. Tiddles must be in or near the Lab--Tiddles who had such a horror of it. But Joey had not time for astonishment. "Stop her! Don't let her go!" she cried. If the Professor knew that she was escaping from her prison! Frances seemed to be bending all her powers to the turning of the key. She was a determined person, accustomed to resisting the onslaughts of the Lower School upon the sugar basin, when she poured out the tea. "Almost got it--there!" she said, with a gasp. The key wheezed and turned; the door opened--Joey was free. "_Thank you_, Frances!" she gasped, and fled past Frances, past little Tiddles standing solemn-eyed and scared at the top of the Lab steps, and away towards the house. She had put on her other shoe while Frances was wrestling with the key; but it was a dirty, hatless girl, with torn stockings and scratched hands, who flung herself round the angle of the house, as the steadily decreasing throb, throb of a motor-bicycle announced that the Professor was making full speed down the drive, and out to the world beyond.