As they approached the house, somewhat perturbed by the prospect, they saw with surprise that the windows were bare of the heavy yellow lace curtains which had hung in the parlor, darkening that handsomely furnished room to a rich twilight.  They went up on the porch, and Judith rang the bell resolutely, while Sylvia hung a little back of her.  From this position she could see into the parlor, and exclaimed, “Why, Judy, this isn’t the right house—­nobody lives here!” The big room was quite empty, the floors bare of the large soft rugs, and as the children pressed their faces to the pane, they could see through an open door into a bedroom also dismantled and deserted.

They ran around the house to the back door and knocked on it.  There was no answer.  Judith turned the knob, the door opened, and they stood in what had been unmistakably the Fingals’ kitchen.  Evidence of wild haste and confusion was everywhere about them—­the floor was littered with excelsior, the shelves half cleared and half occupied still with cooking supplies, a packing-box partly filled with kitchenware which at the last moment the fugitives had evidently decided to abandon.

The little girls stood in this silent desolation, looking about them with startled eyes.  A lean mother-cat came and rubbed her thin, pendent flanks against their legs, purring and whining.  Three kittens skirmished joyfully in the excelsior, waylaying one another in ambush and springing out with bits of the yellow fibers clinging to their woolly soft fur.

“They’ve gone!” breathed Sylvia.  “They’ve gone away for good!”

Judith nodded, even her bold and unimaginative spirit somewhat daunted by the ghostly silence of the house.  Sylvia tiptoed to the swinging-door and pushed it open.  Yes, there was the pantry, like the kitchen, in chaotic disorder, tissue paper and excelsior thick on the floor, and entangled with it the indescribable jumble of worthless, disconnected objects always tumbled together by a domestic crisis like a fire or a removal—­old gloves, whisk-brooms, hat-forms, lamps, magazines, tarnished desk-fittings.  The sight was so eloquent of panic haste that Sylvia let the door swing shut, and ran back into the kitchen.

Judith was pointing silently to a big paper bag on the shelf.  It had been tossed there with some violence evidently, for the paper had burst and the contents had cascaded out on the shelf and on the floor—­the rich, be-raisined cookies which Camilla was to have taken to the picnic.  Sylvia felt the tears stinging her eyelids, and pulled Judith out of the tragic house.  They stood for a moment in the yard, beside a bed of flowering crocuses, brilliant in the sun.  The forsaken house looked down severely at them from its blank windows.  Judith was almost instantly relieved of mental tension by the outdoor air, and stooped down unconcernedly to tie her shoe.  She broke the lacing and had to sit down, take it out of the shoe, tie it, and put it back again.  The operation took some time, during which Sylvia stood still, her mind whirling.