Barbara pushed open the lattice window as wide as it would go, and leaned out breathlessly. Her finger was on her lips, and she shivered from head to foot with cold and the fear of being overheard. Supposing that any one were to find out they were there, and should send them away before she could get to them?
The five of them made frantic signs of welcome, as soon as they saw the familiar dark head appear at the window. In spite of the graphic description contained in her letter, they were beginning to be afraid of having besieged the wrong window. Then Kit waved a screw of paper and made more signs, and the dark head vanished from view again. It did not take a minute to turn out all the contents of her corner drawer, and to find the ball of string that Robin had given her for a parting present, and then to fling the end of it down to Kit, who tied on his screw of paper and nodded at her to haul it up.
The moonlight was bright enough to enable her to read the few short pencilled lines without much difficulty.
'We've come to the rescue,' she read. 'Auntie Anna has gone away till to-morrow, so we could not wait until then, knowing you were so jolly blue. Come down quickly; there's a window under yours that you could get through all right.'
Barbara struggled with desperate haste into her pink dressing-gown, thrust her bare feet into a pair of woolly slippers, and glided to the door. In her haste and her half-awakened condition a more elaborate costume than that, considering the urgency of the occasion, seemed quite unnecessary to her. Along the silent gallery she pattered, and down the wide staircase, then through the two empty playrooms into the front hall. She knew the window the boys had meant; she had noticed the red berries tapping against the glass, as she passed it on her way to Finny's study the morning before.
As she sped across the moonlit hall, she did not see that the study door was ajar and that a chink of light shone out from it. All her attention was absorbed in the one thought that the boys were going to take her away from this houseful of unfriendly strangers, and that she would never have to face them and their taunts again.
She clambered on to the window-seat, and unfastened the shutter. That was easy enough, but the bolt of the window baffled her for some seconds. When she did manage to shoot it back, the noise it made filled her with apprehension. In her terror lest she should have been overheard, she did not pause another instant, but threw up the sash and hastily put one slippered foot on the ledge. Once outside and on her bicycle, the boys would take care that no one overtook her; and she would be free at last!