"Stop snivelling and come here, Jane," he cried, encouragingly. "Lend a hand to heave this up. If we can get into the house we might sneak down without meeting anyone, with luck. Come on." They heaved up the door till it stood straight up, and, as they bent to look into the hole below, the door fell back with a hollow clang on the leads behind, and with its noise was mingled a blood-curdling scream from underneath. "Discovered!" hissed Robert. "Oh, my cats alive!" They were indeed discovered. They found themselves looking down into an attic, which was also a lumber-room. It had boxes and broken chairs, old fenders and picture-frames, and rag-bags hanging from nails. In the middle of the floor was a box, open, half full of clothes. Other clothes lay on the floor in neat piles. In the middle of the piles of clothes sat a lady, very flat indeed, with her feet sticking out straight in front of her. And it was she who had screamed, and who, in fact, was still screaming. "Don't!" cried Jane, "please don't! We won't hurt you." "Where are the rest of your gang?" asked the lady, stopping short in the middle of a scream. "The others have gone on, on the Wishing Carpet," said Jane, truthfully. "The Wishing Carpet?" said the lady. "Yes," said Jane, before Robert could say, "You shut up!" "You must have read about it. The Phoenix is with them." Then the lady got up, and picking her way carefully between the piles of clothes she got to the door and through it. She shut it behind her, and the two children could hear her calling "Septimus! Septimus!" in a loud yet frightened way. "Now," said Robert, quickly; "I'll drop first." He hung by his hands and dropped through the trap-door. "Now you. Hang by your hands. I'll catch you. Oh, there's no time for jaw. Drop, I say." Jane dropped. [Illustration: "JANE DROPPED."] Robert tried to catch her, and even before they had finished the breathless roll among the piles of clothes, which was what his catching ended in, he whispered:-- "We'll hide--behind those fenders and things; they'll think we've gone along the roofs. Then, when all is calm, we'll creep down the stairs and take our chance." They hastily hid. A corner of an iron bedstead struck into Robert's side, and Jane had only standing room for one foot--but they bore it--and when the lady came back, not with Septimus, but with another lady, they held their breath and their hearts beat thickly. "Gone!" said the first lady; "poor little things--quite mad, my dear--and at large! We must lock this room and send for the police." "Let me look out," said the second lady, who was, if possible, older and thinner and primmer than the first. So the two ladies dragged a box under the trap-door and put another box on the top of it, and then they both climbed up very carefully and put their two trim, tidy heads out of the trap-door to look for the "mad children." "Now," whispered Robert, getting the bedstead-leg out of his side.