She and Genevieve occupied themselves with their bonds, fumbling back to back for a while, until Genevieve had a brilliant idea. Kneeling, she bit at the cords which held Miss Eliot's wrists until they began to give. * * * * * What Betty had done intelligently was nothing to what she had done without meaning it. She had been unkind to Pudge. Young Sheridan was in a condition which, according to his own way of looking at it, demanded the utmost kindness. Following a too free indulgence in _marrons glaces_ he had been relegated to a diet that reduced him to the extremity of desperation. Not only had he been forbidden to eat sweets, but while his soul still longed for its accustomed solace, his stomach refused it, and he was unable to eat a box of candied fruit which he had with the greatest ingenuity secured. And that was the occasion Betty took--herself full of nervous starts and mysterious recourse to the telephone behind locked doors--to remind him cruelly that he was getting flabby from staying too much in the house and to recommend a long walk for his good. It was plain that she would stick at nothing to get her brother out of the way, and Pudge was cut to the heart. Oh, well, he would go for a walk, from which he would probably be brought home a limp and helpless cripple. Come to think of it, if he once got started to walk he was not sure he would ever turn back; he would just walk on and on into a kinder environment than this. After all, it is impossible to walk in that fateful way in a crowded city thoroughfare. Besides, one passes so many confectioners with their mingled temptation and disgust. Pudge rode on the trolley as far as the city limits. Here there was softer ground underfoot and a hint of melancholy in the fields. A flock of crows going over gave the appropriate note. Off there to the left, set back from the road among dark, crowding trees, stood a mysterious house. Pudge always insisted that he had known it for mysterious at the first glance. It had a mansard roof and shutters of a sickly green, all closed; there was not a sign of life about, but smoke issued from one of the chimneys. Here was an item potent to raise the sleuth that slumbers in every boy, even in such well-cushioned bosoms as Pudge Sheridan's. He paused in his walk, fell into an elaborately careless slouch, and tacked across the open country toward the back of the house. Here he discovered a considerable yard fenced with high boards that had once been painted the same sickly green as the shutters, and a great buckeye tree just outside, spreading its branches over the corner furthest from the house. Toward this post of observation he was drifting with that fine assumption of aimlessness which can be managed on occasion by almost any boy, when he was arrested by a slight but unmistakable shaking of one of the shutters, as though some one from within were trying the fastenings.