“Merciful powers!” he exclaimed.  “Whatever has become of them two witches?”

“Where can they be?” cried Stella, clasping her hands, and opening her eyes wide in alarm.

Old Carter was genuinely frightened.  “Miss Marjorie!” he called, loudly.  “Miss Molly!  Where be ye?”

Meanwhile, the two girls inside the boathouse had carefully scrambled down into the boat and sat quietly on the stern seat.  There was a strong breeze blowing, and as the boat swayed up and down on the rippling water, its keel grating against the post to which it was tied, and the doors and windows being tightly shut, they did not hear Carter’s voice.  They really had no intention of frightening the old man, and supposed he would open the door in a moment.

But Carter’s mind was so filled with the thought that the children had fallen into the water that it didn’t occur to him to open the boathouse.  He went to the edge of the pier, which was a narrow affair, consisting only of two wooden planks and a single hand rail, and gazed anxiously down into the water.

This gave Stella a firm conviction that the girls were drowned, and without another word she began to cry in her own noisy and tumultuous fashion.  Poor Carter, already at his wits’ end, had small patience with any additional worry.

“Keep still, Miss Stella,” he commanded; “it’s enough to have two children on me hands drowned without another one raising a hullabaloo.  And it’s a queer thing, too, if them wicked little rats is drownded, why they don’t come up to the surface!  My stars!  Whatever will the Missus say?  But, havin’ disappeared so mortal quick, there’s no place they can be but under the water.  I’ll get a boat-hook, and perhaps I can save ’em yet.”

Trembling with excitement and bewildered with anxiety, so that he scarcely knew what he did, the old man fitted the key in the lock.  He flung open the boathouse door and faced the two children, who sat quietly and with smiling faces in the boat.

“Well, if ye don’t beat all!  Good land, Miss Marjorie, whatever did ye give me such a scare for?  Sure I thought ye was drownded, and I was jest goin’ to fish ye up with a boat-hook!  My, but you two are terrors!  And how did ye get in now?  Through the keyhole, I suppose.”

“Why, no, Carter,” exclaimed Marjorie, who was really surprised at the old man’s evident excitement; “we were in a hurry, and the door was locked, so we just stepped in through the window.”

“Stepped in through the window, is it?  And if the window had been locked ye’d have jest stepped in through the chimley!  And if the chimley had been locked, ye’d have stepped into the water, and ducked under, and come up through the floor!  When ye’re in a hurry, ye stop for nothin’, Miss Midget.”

The old man’s relief at finding the children safe was so great that he was really talking a string of nonsense to hide his feelings.

But Stella, though she realized the girls were all right, could not control her own emotions so easily, and was still crying vociferously.