Bunny stood up and looked. He had fallen on a pile of cloth bags which the painters had left inside the house. It was lucky for Bunny that the bags were there, or he might have been badly bruised. As it was he and Sue were not hurt, and, having picked themselves up, and brushed off their clothes, they were ready to go back home.

And it was quite time, too, for the shadows were getting longer and longer out in the street, as the sun went down.

"It was the front door that blew shut with such a bang," Bunny said, as he and Sue went down the long, front hall. "It was open when we came in, but it's shut now."

"The wind blew it, I guess," said Sue. "I wonder if you can get it open, Bunny?"

"Sure!" her brother said.

But when Bunny tried to open the front door he could not. Either it was too tightly shut, or else some spring lock had snapped shut. There was no key in the hole, but Bunny turned and twisted the k.n.o.b, this way and that. But the door would not open.

"Let me try," said Sue, seeing that Bunny was not getting the door to swing open so they could get out. "Let me try."

"Pooh! If I can't do it, you can't," Bunny said. He did not exactly mean to be impolite, but he meant that he was stronger than his little sister and so she could hardly hope to do what he could not.

"Oh, but Bunny, what will we do if we can't get the door open?" Sue asked, and she seemed almost as frightened as the day when she had fallen down in the mud puddle when she and Bunny went to meet Aunt Lu.

"Well, if I can't get the front door open, maybe I can get the back one or the side one open," Bunny said. "Come on, we'll try them."

But the back door was also locked and there was no key in that to turn.

Neither was there a side door. Both the front and back doors were locked.

Bunny looked at Sue, and Sue looked at her little brother. Her eyes were bright and shiny, as though she were going to cry. Bunny tried to speak bravely.

"Sue--we--we're locked in!" he said.

"Oh, Bunny!" she exclaimed. "What are we going to do? Oh! Oh! Oh dear!"

CHAPTER VI

ADRIFT IN A BOAT

Bunny Brown was a brave little chap, even though he was only a bit over six years old, "going on seven," as he always proudly said. And one of the matters in which he was braver than anything else was about his sister Sue.

His mother had often spoken to him about his sister when he and Sue were allowed to walk up and down in the street, but not to go off the home block.

"Now, Bunny," Mrs. Brown would say, "take good care of little Sue!"

And Bunny would answer:

"I will, Mother!"

Now was a time when he must look after her and take special care of her.

The first thing he said to Sue was:

"Don't cry, Sister!" Sometimes he called her that instead of Sue.

"I--I'm not going to cry," Sue answered, but, even then, there were tears in her eyes. "I'm not going to cry, but oh, Bunny, we're locked in, and there's n.o.body here----"

"I'm here!" said Bunny quickly.

"Yes, of course," answered Sue. "But you can't get the doors open, Bunny, and we can't get out when the doors are shut."

Bunny thought for a moment. What Sue said was very true. One could not go through a locked door.

"If we were only fairies now," said Bunny slowly, "it would be all right."

"How would it be?" Sue asked, opening her eyes wide.

"Why, if we were fairies," Bunny explained, "all we would have to do would be to change ourselves into smoke and we could float right out through the keyhole."

"Oh, but I wouldn't like to be smoke!" cried Sue. "That wouldn't be any fun. Why we couldn't play tag, or eat ice cream cones or--or anything.

And the wind would blow us all away, if we were smoke."

"Oh, we wouldn't be smoke all the while," Bunny said. "Only just while we were going through the keyhole. Once we were on the other side we could change back into our own selves again."

"Oh, that would be all right," Sue said. She went up close to the keyhole of the front door and peeped through. Maybe she was trying to wish herself small enough to crawl out of the locked, empty house, without changing into smoke.

But of course Bunny and Sue were not fairies, and of course they could not turn into smoke, so there they had to stay, locked in.

"But, Bunny, what are we going to do?" asked Sue, as they went back and forth from the front to the back door.

"Maybe I can open a window," Bunny said. But he was not tall enough to reach more than past the window sill. The middle of the sash was far away, and he could see that the catch was on. If there had been a chair in the house, perhaps Bunny might have stood on it and opened a window, but there was none.

In one of the rooms Bunny did find an empty box. Moving this up to the window to stand on he found he could reach the middle of the sash, and turn the fastener.

"Now if I can only push up the window, Sue!" he cried.

"I'll help you," the little girl said. "Here's a stick, I can push with that."

So with Bunny standing on the box, and Sue, on the floor, pushing with the stick, they tried to put up the window in order to get out of the empty house.

But the window would not go up, and all of a sudden Sue's stick slipped and banged against the gla.s.s.

"Oh! Look out!" cried Bunny. "You nearly broke it."

"I didn't mean to."

"No. But I guess we'd better not try to raise the window. We might break the gla.s.s."

Bunny knew a boy who, when playing ball, broke a window, and he had to save up all his pennies for a month to pay for the new gla.s.s. Bunny did not want to do that.

So the children went away from the window.