She paused a moment, but nobody offered to do it.  Anne was reading De Maupassant under cover of a table, and the rest pretended not to hear.  After a pause, Aunt Selina got up heavily and went upstairs, coming down soon after with a bundle covered with a green shawl, and with a white balbriggan stocking trailing from an opening in it.  She paused at the library door, surveyed the inmates, caught my unlucky eye and beckoned to me with a relentless forefinger.

“We can put them to soak tonight,” she confided to me, “and tomorrow they will be quite simple to do.  There is no lace to speak of”—­Dal raised his eyebrows—­“and very little flouncing.”

Aunt Selina and I went to the laundry.  It never occurred to any one that Bella should have gone; she had stepped into all my privileges—­such as they were—­and assumed none of my obligations.  Aunt Selina and I went to the laundry.

It is strange what big things develop from little ones.  In this case it was a bar of soap.  And if Flannigan had used as much soap as he should have instead of washing up the kitchen floor with cold dish water, it would have developed sooner.  The two most unexpected events of the whole quarantine occurred that night at the same time, one on the roof and one in the cellar.  The cellar one, although curious, was not so serious as the other, so it comes first.

Aunt Selina put her clothes in a tub in the laundry and proceeded to dress them like a vegetable.  She threw in a handful of salt, some kerosene oil and a little ammonia.  The result was villainous, but after she tasted it—­or snuffed it—­she said it needed a bar of soap cut up to give it strength—­or flavor—­and I went into the store room for it.

The laundry soap was in a box.  I took in a silver fork, for I hated to touch the stuff, and jabbed a bar successfully in the semi-darkness.  Then I carried it back to the laundry and dropped it on the table.  Aunt Selina looked at the fork with disgust; then we both looked at the soap.  One side of it was covered with round Holes that curved around on each other like A coiled snake.

I ran back to the store room, and there, a little bit sticky and smelling terribly of rosin, lay Anne’s pearl necklace!

I was so excited that I seized Aunt Selina by the hands and danced her all over the place.  Then I left her, trying to find her hair pins on the floor, and ran up to tell the others.  I met Betty in the hall and waved the pearls at her.  But she did not notice them.

“Is Mr. Harbison down there?” she asked breathlessly.  “I left him on the roof and went down to my room for my scarf, and when I went back he had disappeared.  He—­he doesn’t seem to be in the house.”  She tried to laugh, but her voice was shaky.  “He couldn’t have got down without passing me, anyhow,” she supplemented.  “I suppose I’m silly, but so many queer things have happened, Kit.”