usual. The noise continued, with pauses at regular intervals, when
whatever was being sharpened was removed from the stone. Taking care not
to disturb her elder sister, Ida, whose heavy breathing showed that she
was sound asleep, the little girl slipped out of bed, and crept softly
over to the window. By straining her neck, and pressing her cheek close
against the pane, she could just get a glimpse of the tool-house window,
which she noticed was faintly illuminated, as it might have been by the
feeble rays of a night-light.

A sudden thought occurred to Elsie that it must be her cousin, Brian
Seaton, who lived at the Pines, and went to school with her brother
Guy. Brian was always boat-building; sometimes he sat up later than he
ought to have done, and continued to work long after every one else was
in bed. No doubt the rascal was doing so now, and had stolen down to put
a fresh edge on his chisel. Elsie was a spirited young monkey, and she
and Brian were great chums.

"I'll just creep down and show him I've found him out," she said to
herself. "What fun to take him by surprise!"

To put on dressing-gown and slippers was but the work of a few moments.
Softly opening the bedroom door, she passed out on to the landing, and
groping in the darkness until she found the rail of the banisters, she
proceeded down the stairs.

How still and quiet the house seemed! Nothing broke the silence but the
solemn "tick-tack" of the big clock in the hall, which had been ticking
in the same sedate manner since the days when Elsie's grandmother had
been a little girl. Feeling her way down the length of the hall, not
without an occasional bump against chairs and other such obstacles,
Elsie came to a little lobby or cloak-room, having at the farther
end a half-glass door, which opened on the yard, and from which the
tool-house was distant not more than a dozen paces. She quite expected
to find this door open, and was surprised to discover that it was not
only shut, but locked on the inside.

"What a beggar Brian is!" thought the girl. "He must have climbed out of
his window, and come down the water-pipe, as he did one day last summer."

She laid her hand on the key, when a low growling noise gave her quite
a little fright, until she remembered that it was the old clock in the
hall preparing to strike--"clearing his throat," as Ida called the
operation. The next moment the bell struck--

"Ting! ting!"

Elsie listened with a gasp of as