Just as her fear was turning to terror the party returned.

“Oh, here you are!” cried Floss.  “We thought we had lost you.  It was just dandy, Miss Lucy; you ought to have gone.  It makes you feel like your feet are growing right out of the top of your head.  Come on; we are going to have our tintypes taken.”

Strengthened by the fear of being left alone again, Miss Lucinda rallied her courage, and once more followed in their wake.  She was faint and exhausted, but the one grain of comfort she extracted from the situation was that through her present suffering she was atoning for her sins.

At midnight Dick said:  “There’s only one other thing to do.  It’s more fun than all the rest put together.  Come this way.”

Miss Lucinda followed blindly.  She had ceased to think; there were only two realities left in the world, French-heels and hair-pins.

At the foot of a flight of steps the party paused to buy tickets.

“You can wait for us here, Miss Lucy,” said Floss.

Miss Lucinda protested eagerly that she was not too tired to go with them.  The prospect of being left alone again nerved her to climb to any height.

“But,” cried Floss, “if you get up there, there’s only one way to come down.  You have to—­”

“Let her come!” interrupted the others in laughing chorus, and, to Miss Lucinda’s great relief, she was allowed to pass through the little gate.

When she reached the top of the long stairs, she looked about for the attraction.  A wide inclined plane slanted down to the ground floor, and on it were bumps of various sizes and shapes, all of a shining smoothness.  She had a vague idea that it was a mammoth map for the blind, until she saw Dick and Floss sit down at the top and go sliding to the bottom.

“Come on, Miss Lucinda!” cried May.  “You can’t get down any other way, you know.  Look out!  Here I go!”

One by one the others followed, and Miss Lucinda could not distinguish them as they merged in the laughing crowd at the base.

Delay was fatal; they would lose her again if she hesitated.  In desperation she gathered her skirts about her, and let herself cautiously down on the floor.  For one awful moment terror paralyzed her, then, grasping her skirts with one hand and her hat with the other and closing her eyes, she slid.

Miss Lucinda did not “hump the bumps”; she slid gracefully around them, describing fanciful curves and loops in her airy flight.  When she arrived in a confused bunch on the cushioned platform below, she was greeted with a burst of applause.

“Ain’t it great?” cried Floss, straightening Miss Lucinda’s hat and trying to get her to open her eyes.  “Dick says you are the gamest chaperon he ever saw.  Sit up and let me pin your collar straight.”

But Miss Lucinda’s sense of direction had evidently been disturbed, for she did not yet know which was up, and which was down.  She leaned limply against Floss and tried to get her breath.