14 Things Happen Fast
“Did you hear that?” whispered Sally. “Someone is coming! Quick, gather everything up, and let’s go!”
The girls grabbed everything near, and Darrell caught up the brush by the fireplace and swept the crumbs¹ under a couch. She put out the light and opened the door. All was dark in the passage outside. There seemed to be nobody there. Who could have been walking about overhead? That was where the first-form dormy was.
June and Felicity were scared now. They shot away at once. Betty, Eileen and Winnie disappeared to the stairs, running down them to the side-door. They could then slip round to their own tower. The others, led by Darrell, went cautiously upstairs to find their own dormy.
A slight cough from somewhere near, a familiar and unmistakable cough, brought them to a stop. They stood, hardly daring to breathe, at the top of the stairs. “That was Potty’s cough,” thought Darrell. “Oh blow—did she hear us making a row? But we really were quite quiet!”
She hoped and hoped that Betty and the other two West Tower girls had got safely to their own dormy without being caught. It really was counted quite a serious offence for girls of one tower to meet girls in another tower at night. For one thing there was no way to get from one tower to another under cover. The girls had to go outside to reach any other tower.
What could Potty be doing? Where was she? The girls stood frozen to the ground, waiting for the sign to move on.
“She’s in the third-form dormy,” whispered Darrell, at last. “Perhaps somebody is ill there. I think we had better make a dash for it, really. We can’t stand here for hours.”
“Right. The next time the thunder comes, we’ll run for it,” said Sally, in a low voice. The word was passed along, and the girls waited anxiously for the thunder. The lightning flashed first, showing up the crouching² line of girls very clearly—and then the thunder came.
It was a good long, rumbling³ crash, and any sound the girls made in scampering⁴ along to their dormy was completely deadened. They fell into bed thankfully, each girl stuffing what she carried into the bottom of her cupboard, wet bathing-suits and all.
No Miss Potts appeared, and the girls began to breathe more freely. Somebody must have been taken ill in the third-form dormy. Potty still seemed to be there. At last the Upper Fourth heard the soft closing of the third-form Dormy, and Miss Potts’ footsteps going quietly off to her own room.

分享到：