One hand grasped the rung above her head while the other held aloft the flickering candle and she began the difficult climb, hampered by the long white robe that clung like something alive about her ankles and by the necessity of holding the candle. Four rungs, five rungs, six rungs—was the ladder a mile long? she wondered, while the wind wailed still more dismally about the house. Then at last she reached the top. Her candle showed a small door not more than four feet high—the door to the tower room. Her hand felt for the knob. She grasped it. The door was locked. To make sure, Billie gave the door a vigorous shake, and as it did so something white and soft fluttered to her feet and fell on the top rung of the ladder. For a minute Billie felt faint and dizzy, and she had to cling to the ladder desperately to keep from falling. The next moment she saw that what had frightened her was only a handkerchief, and she stooped to pick it up. It was old and stained. What was that stain upon it? She brought the little square of linen closer to her eyes and then with a stifled scream she flung it from her while the candle fell from her nerveless fingers and went out, leaving her in the dark. The stain on the handkerchief was _blood_! Billie never remembers to this day how she got out of that awful place. Someway she half fell, half scrambled down the ladder, stumbled and fell and stumbled again in her mad rush across the pitch-black attic to the head of the stairs. Then down, down, down, a countless number of stairs that came up and hit her in the face—down, down to the gymnasium where thousands of ghostly figures rushed at her—— “Oh, what could have happened to have frightened her so?” she heard a voice saying from a long, long distance, and she opened her eyes to find Laura’s white face bending anxiously over her while other white-faced girls stared at her pityingly. She struggled to her feet, but her knees wavered so that she sat down again quite suddenly. “What’s the matter with you all?” she asked, then as the memory of what had happened came back to her in a flood she shuddered and instinctively she looked down at her hands to see if they still held that piece of linen with the stains upon it. “Oh, I remember,” she murmured, as though talking to herself. The girls were watching her anxiously. “I threw it away.” “What, honey?” asked Laura gently. “The blood-stained handkerchief!” CHAPTER XV—A DISCOVERY It took the other girls some time to get the whole story from Billie, but when she had stammered it out to them they broke into a babel of excited exclamations that threatened to bring one of the teachers to their hiding place. It was Billie herself who thought of this danger and who finally managed to calm them down a little. “Not so loud,” she entreated, still feeling faint and shaky from her experience. “You know what will happen if somebody finds us here.”