“Do you think we can get it, Mary?” Billie was saying.
“Oh, yes, the janitor always leaves the door to the basement corridor open until evening for Miss Gray and the teachers who sometimes stay late.”
“It was stupid of me to have left that horrid old algebra, but you know I always forget the things I don’t like. If Miss Finch hadn’t called me down so thoroughly this morning about my average in mathematics, I would just let the lesson for to-morrow go, or if Miss Finch were only Miss Allbright, or Miss anybody else but just a stern, animated mathematical cube.”
“She’s all right if you know your lessons,” said Mary, smiling. “It’s only the ones who don’t study hard enough to suit her who call her a human arithmetic.”
The door to the corridor was open, as Mary had predicted, and the girls entered, their footsteps resounding with a hollow echo through the empty place.
“‘I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted,’” quoted Billie. “Could anything be more ghostly than a deserted school?”
“It’s not deserted,” said Nancy. “I heard voices somewhere, I am certain of it, just as you opened the door.”
They paused and listened for a moment, but the place was as still as a tomb. A dim gas-light burned in the long corridor, on each side of which were the arched entrances to the locker rooms of the various classes, wash rooms and Miss Gray’s own private office.
“It reminds me of the catacombs in this light,” whispered Billie. “I’m almost afraid of the sound of my own voice.”
The girls slipped silently down the passage to the stairway leading to the class rooms. At her desk in the sophomore study room on the third floor Billie found her algebra. As she gathered together some of her scattered papers in the not over tidy interior of the little one-seated desk form, and searched for a certain favorite stubby pencil which she claimed brought her good luck with her problems, Mary at her own desk gave a cry of dismay and sat down limply.
“What was it, a mouse?” asked Billie, her voice sounding quite loud in the empty room.
“Oh, Billie, Billie, no, it was not a mouse. It was fifty dollars,” cried Mary. “I found it just now in my desk.”
“Fifty dollars?” echoed Billie, slipping her algebra into her pocket and hurrying over to her friend’s desk. “Are you playing a trick on me, Mary?”