'--and then we listened again, but there was
no more noise. Presently Dora said in a whisper--

'Whatever shall we do? Oh, whatever shall we do--what _shall_ we do?'
And she kept on saying it till we had to tell her to shut up.

O reader, have you ever been playing Red Indians in blankets round a
bedroom fire in a house where you thought there was no one but you--and
then suddenly heard a noise like a chair, and a fire being poked,
downstairs? Unless you have you will not be able to imagine at all what
it feels like. It was not like in books; our hair did not stand on end
at all, and we never said 'Hist!' once, but our feet got very cold,
though we were in blankets by the fire, and the insides of Oswald's
hands got warm and wet, and his nose was cold like a dog's, and his ears
were burning hot.

The girls said afterwards that they shivered with terror, and their
teeth chattered, but we did not see or hear this at the time.

'Shall we open the window and call police?' said Dora; and then Oswald
suddenly thought of something, and he breathed more freely and he said--

'I _know_ it's not ghosts, and I don't believe it's robbers. I expect
it's a stray cat got in when the coals came this morning, and she's
been hiding in the cellar, and now she's moving about. Let's go down and
see.'

The girls wouldn't, of course; but I could see that they breathed more
freely too. But Dicky said, 'All right; I will if you will.'

H. O. said, 'Do you think it's _really_ a cat?' So we said he had better
stay with the girls. And of course after that we had to let him and
Alice both come. Dora said if we took Noel down with his cold, she would
scream 'Fire!' and 'Murder!' and she didn't mind if the whole street
heard.

So Noel agreed to be getting his clothes on, and the rest of us said we
would go down and look for the cat.

Now Oswald _said_ that about the cat, and it made it easier to go down,
but in his inside he did not feel at all sure that it might not be
robbers after all. Of course, we had often talked about robbers before,
but it is very different when you sit in a room and listen and listen
and listen; and Oswald felt somehow that it would be easier to go down
and see what it was, than to wait, and listen, and wait, and wait, and
listen, and wait, and then perhaps to hear _it_, whatever it was, come
creeping slowly up the stairs as softly as _it_ could with _its_ boots
off, and the stairs creaking, towards the room where w