“I think so,” was the reply.

The Monkey was just going to raise the lid, by prying under it with the long stick up and down which he climbed, when, all of a sudden, there was a noise in the room.

“Some one is coming!” whispered the Doll.

“I hear them,” said the Monkey.  He looked out through the keyhole and saw a man wading through the water toward the desk.  “I guess it’s the night watchman,” went on the Monkey in a whisper.

“We don’t have a night watchman in school,” whispered back the Doll.  “But we have a janitor.  Maybe it’s the janitor coming.”

And so it was.  The janitor had shut off some of the water in the broken pipes, and he was going about from room to room to see how much damage had been done.  He walked up to the desk inside of which the Monkey and Doll had been placed.

“Well, I do declare!” exclaimed the janitor, and the Monkey and the Doll heard him.  “There’s ink running out of the drawer of the teacher’s desk!  Ink running out of her desk, and water running out of the broken pipes!  Sure the school had bad luck to-day!  But I must see about this ink.  It may spoil everything in the drawer.  The bottle must have been upset and the cork came out when the teacher and children were running around after the pipes burst.”

The Monkey turned away from the keyhole and looked at the bottle of ink.  Surely enough, it lay on its side, and the cork was out.  A stream of black liquid was running out of the bottle, dripping down through a crack in the teacher’s desk.

“Oh, do you suppose you did that?” asked the Doll in a whisper of the Monkey.

“I—­I guess maybe I did,” he answered.  “After I dipped my tail in the ink and marked your face, maybe I didn’t put the cork back in tightly enough.  And when I jumped around, to see what all the racket was about, I must have knocked the bottle over.”

The janitor opened the lid of the desk, at the same time saying: 

“I’d better take the teacher’s things out and keep them for her until morning.  What with the ink and water, everything may be spoiled.”

A bright light shone in on the Monkey and the Doll when the top of the desk was opened by the janitor.  Of course both the toys kept very still as soon as the janitor looked at them.  This was the rule, as I have told you in the other books.

It did not take the school janitor long to cork the ink bottle and stop any more of the black fluid running out.

“Well, well!” said the janitor, looking at the ink-splashed Doll and the ink-tipped Monkey.  “I’ll take these two toys home and maybe my little girl can clean them.  Then I’ll bring them back to school to-morrow, and the teacher can give them to whoever owns them.  Yes, I’ll take the Monkey and Doll home to my house.”

And this the janitor did.  He stuffed the Monkey on a Stick, and also the Cotton Doll, into his pocket, taking care, of course, not to break them, and then, having cleaned from the room as much of the water as he could, the janitor went home.