"I'd like to know how I'm going to do it without waking her, too," he said.
"Oh, I'll fix that part," she replied, beginning to smile a little. "Of course you can't pound on the door; but I've got a trick worth two of that. I'll tie a string round my wrist and let the end hang out of the window. Then, when you come by, you can pull it and that'll wake me up. I waked a girl that way once, on Fourth of July (only the string was round her ankle), and she slept so like a log that she said I almost pulled her out of the window before she was fairly awake. But you needn't be afraid of pulling me out. Just give a twitch and I shall feel it. I sleep on the front side."
"All right," said Tom, and then he could not help adding, "but I'll tell you now that your going down there won't do a bit of good, and you'd better keep out of it."
"It'll do _me_ good to free my mind," said Kate. "And after that I mean to take your advice, Tom, and quit worrying."
The allusion to his advice was gratifying. Tom agreed to administer the twitch at half-past four the next morning, and they separated, feeling like a pair of conspirators, Kate at least clear in the opinion that she was conspiring for the good of humanity.
She lay awake so long that night, turning in her mind what she would say to Aunt Katharine, and never getting it settled, for the singular reason that she could never foresee what Aunt Katharine would say next, that it seemed to her she had not been asleep at all when there came the appointed signal in the cool of the morning. For a moment she had a passing dream that some one was trying to amputate her hand with a wood-saw, then it all came back to her. Her eyes flew open, and she crept stealthily out of bed. A flutter of the curtain showed Tom she was astir, but after that there was as little flutter as possible.
She slipped into her clothes as noiselessly as a ghost, with fearful glances at Esther, who slept on in serene oblivion of the plot against her, carried her shoes in her hand to the foot of the stairs, and went out through the kitchen, where even Aunt Elsie had not yet made her appearance. At the barn she paused a minute for a word with Tom and a cup of new milk, then flew down the lane, anxious still lest some one, looking unseasonably from the house, should see her, till the bend of the first hill hid her from view.