Suddenly, she had an idea. It was not nearly one o’clock in the morning. Perhaps the sleeping man was not dangerous. At seven or eight o’clock he must get up and go out to work. ‘I can get under the bed and wait there until he goes. Men never look under the bed. When he sees the door-handle on the floor, he is going to open the door with something or call the girl to come. Later, I can come out from under the bed and go quietly back to my room. Nobody is going to know.’
She lay down on the floor and got under the bed. No sound came from the man above her, but from here it was difficult to hear anything. She tried to think of her little bedroom in Easingstoke with its nice bed but the floor was getting harder every minute. She tried to think what her room number was. One hundred and fifteen? Or was it one hundred and sixteen?
She was always bad at remembering numbers. She began to think about her schooldays and the interesting things she learned then. Suddenly, she felt that she was going to sneeze.
