azement the
girls found themselves in the tower room.

It was a square room with a sloping ceiling and narrow windows; there
was nothing in the least unusual about it. Gyp and Jerry looked about
them, vaguely disappointed. It might have been, with its litter of old
furniture, chests of books, piles of magazines and papers, an attic room
in any house. The October sunshine filtered in thin bars through the
dust-stained windows, cobwebs festooned themselves fantastically
overhead. The opening that led to the secret stairway appeared, on the
inside of the room, to be a built-in bookcase on the shelves of which
were now piled an assortment of hideous bric-a-brac which Mrs. Robert
Westley had refused to take into her own home.

"Well, it's fun, anyway, just having the secret stairway," decided Gyp,
scowling at what she mentally called the "junk" about her. "_Why_ do you
suppose Uncle Peter had it built in?"

Jerry could offer no explanation.

"Hadn't we ought to tell someone?"

Gyp scorned the thought--part with their precious secret--let everybody
know that that imposing portrait of George Washington hid a _secret
door_? Why, even mother and Uncle Johnny couldn't know it--it was their
very own secret!

"I should say _not_. At least----" she added, "not for awhile. I guess
I'm a Westley and I have a right to come up here." Which argument
sounded very convincing to Jerry.

"Oh, I have the grandest idea," Gyp dragged Jerry to the faded
window-seat and plumped down upon it so hard that it sent a little cloud
of dust about them. "Let's get up a secret society--like the horrid old
Sphinxes."

Fraternities and sororities were not allowed in Lincoln School, but from
time to time there had sprung up secret bands of boys and girls, that
held together by irrevealable ties for a little while, then passed into
school history. One of these was the Sphinxes. They were annoyingly
mysterious and dark rumors were current that their antics, if known,
would not meet, in the least, the approval of the Lincoln faculty.
Isobel was a Sphinx, most faithful to her vows, so that all the teasing
and bribing that Graham's and Gyp's fertile brains could contrive,
failed to drag one tiny truth from her.

Of course Jerry had been at Lincoln long enough to know all about the
Sphinxes. And she knew, too, that Gyp meant to suggest a society that
would be like the Sphinxes only in that it was secret. She could not be
one of that Third Form study-ro