Posey was too excited by all that had happened, too thrilled with her new, wild determination, to sleep much or soundly. Nearly every hour she heard the old clock in the kitchen strike, and when she counted three she slipped noiselessly out of bed. Her room was no longer dark; a great yellow moon had risen and made it, as well as the outer world, almost as light as day. Indeed it is safe to say that but for that flood of softly illuminating brightness Posey would never have dared to put her rash impulse to the test. As it was, her fingers shook as she gathered together a few articles from her scanty wardrobe and tied them up in a gingham apron, not forgetting the few mementos of her mother which through everything she had clung to, and were the first to be thought of now. Then putting on her coarse straw hat, and wrapping about her an old cape that chanced to be hanging in the room, she took her shoes in her hand, cautiously raised the window, and carefully crept out, something easily done as it was but a few feet from the ground. As Posey stole around the corner of the house old Rover saw her, and after a brief sniff came toward her wagging his tail in friendly recognition. Many a time had she been comforted by the voiceless sympathy in the soft eyes of this dumb friend, and now as she stroked his head, and felt the touch of his warm tongue on her hand, her sense of utter desolation was for the moment relieved. When she reached the pantry window Posey put down her bundle and stretching on tiptoe slipped her slender hand between the slats of the blind, and easily lifted the latch, and then with the help of a stool on the back porch quickly crept in. Mr. and Mrs. Hagood slept quite on the other side of the house, and moving quietly she had no fear of being heard by them, while the bright moonlight gave her light enough. She had come to the pantry for two reasons: to make up for the supper she had lost the night before, and to get supplies for the enterprise on which she was entering. Nor did she hesitate to take the best she could find. “I’ve done enough here to earn it,” was her reasoning, as she helped herself plentifully and without a scruple to the company cake kept sacredly in a tin box. She appropriated the cold chicken set aside for the morning’s breakfast, with a naughty chuckle at the thought of Mrs. Hagood’s wrath when she should discover its absence, and she spread her thick bread and butter with the best peach preserves that were only brought out on especial occasions. And having satisfied her appetite she next packed full a small-handle basket she found on a shelf, adding as its crowning delicacy a saucer pumpkin pie, she by chance discovered. This done, as she was turning to leave, her eye fell on a memorandum book with pencil attached in which Mrs. Hagood kept her egg account. The sight suggested an idea, and tearing out a blank leaf she wrote on it as best she might by the uncertain light, in a sprawling, childish hand: