to Lindsay to get off the
stack by the back instead of the front. If they had gone out of the barn
by the way they came, they could have overtaken Miss Frazer in a
moment, and the adventure which followed would never have happened at
all. As it was, fate decreed that Lindsay, in her flying leap through
the dusk, should knock her shins against something decidedly hard. She
stood rubbing them ruefully, and put out her hand to feel what had been
the cause of her bruises. It was a ladder, standing against the wall,
and through the gloom of the barn she could just distinguish its upper
end, which seemed to communicate with a doorway in the angle of the
roof. This looked attractive. She pointed it out at once to Cicely.

"Where does it lead, do you think?" asked the latter.

"To some granary above, I expect. I wonder what's up there! Shall we go
and explore?"

Without even waiting for an answer, Lindsay had begun to ascend, and as
she was six rungs up before Cicely ventured a half-hearted remonstrance,
she did not see fit to come down again.

"Oh! we shan't be a minute," she declared. "Miss Frazer will wait for us
in the wood, and we can run all the way from the farm."

Where Lindsay went Cicely always felt bound to follow; accordingly, she
clambered up the ladder behind her friend, and in due course both
arrived at the top. As Lindsay had supposed, they found a granary
half-filled with sacks of corn and a pile of loose barley. A door at
the farther end appeared to open on to a flight of steps leading
outside, while opposite was a small lattice window overlooking the
fields.

"There's really nothing to see," said Cicely. "It was hardly worth while
coming, after all."

"We might go out through that door, instead of climbing down the ladder
again," suggested Lindsay, beginning to walk round the sacks. "Why,
look! Somebody has left his lunch here."

On the top of the barley was a tin can, and also a red cotton
pocket-handkerchief, evidently containing slices of bread. From sheer
idle curiosity Lindsay seized them, and showed them laughingly to
Cicely.

"Will you have some afternoon tea?" she exclaimed in joke.

At that moment she was startled by a low growl behind her. From a corner
of the room sprang a collie dog that, unobserved by them, had been lying
among the sacks, and keeping a watch over its master's property.

Lindsay promptly replaced the tin and the handkerchief on the barley.

"Good dog! Poor fellow!"