Yet playing and pretending, and, worse than anything, waiting, grew very tiresome to Tania. On the morning of the fourth day of her imprisonment Tania awoke with a start. Something had knocked on her window pane. It was only the old cedar tree, and Tania turned over in bed with a sob. But the tapping went on. She got up and went to her window. Quick as a flash Tania made up her mind to run away. Why had she never thought of it before? It was true, her bedroom door was always locked, but here were the branches of the cedar tree reaching close up to her window. Really, this morning they seemed to speak quite distinctly to Tania:
"Why in the world don't you come to me? I shall hold you quite safe! You can climb down through all my arms to the warm earth and then run away to your friends."
It was just after dawn. The pink sky was showing against the earlier grayness when Tania slipped into her coarse clothes and, like a small elf, crept out of her window into the friendly branches of the old tree. She was silent and swift as a squirrel as she clambered down. But she need not have feared. No one in the lonely country place was awake but the child.
Once on the ground, Tania ran on and on, without thinking where she was going. She only wished to get far away from the dreary house where Philip Holt had hidden her. There was a thick woods about a mile or so from Tania's starting place. No one would find her there. Once she was through it Tania hoped to find a town, or at least a farm, where she could ask for help. In spite of her queer, unchildlike ways, Tania knew enough to understand that if she could only find some one to telegraph to her friends they would soon come to her.
But the forest through which Tania hoped to pass was a dreadful cedar swamp, and in trying to cross it Tania wandered far into it and found herself hopelessly lost.
In the three days that had passed since the disappearance of Tania from the houseboat everything that was possible had been done to discover her whereabouts.
It never occurred to Tom or to Mrs. Curtis to connect Philip Holt's odd behavior with the lost Tania or the vanished treasure box. True, he had not been seen for the past three days, but Mrs. Curtis had received a note from him the day after his disappearance from her house, saying that he had been unexpectedly called away on very important business so early in the morning that he had not wished to awaken her, but he had left word with the servants and he hoped that they had explained matters to her.