Up here they crept, hurriedly and stealthily.

One or two boys met them on the way, but Georgie swaggered past them, as though bound to pay an ordinary morning call on some occupant of the top floor.

The top floor of all was dedicated to the use of the maids, who at that hour of the day were too much occupied elsewhere in making beds and filling jugs, to be at all inconvenient.
Heathcote, who, considering he had never made the expedition before, was wonderfully well up in the geography of the place, piloted Coote up a sort of ladder which ended in a trap-door in the ceiling of the garret.
"I know it's up here," he said.

"Raggles told me it was the way Fitch got up." "Oh!" said Coote, hanging tight on to the ladder with both arms, and trusting that, whichever way they ascended, they might select a different mode of descent from that adopted by the unfortunate Fitch.
Horrors! The trap-door was padlocked! Joy! The padlock was not locked! They opened the flap, and scrambled into a cavernous space between the ceiling and the roof, from which, to Coote's relief, there seemed no exit, except by the door at which they entered.
Heathcote, however, was not to be put off, and scrambled round the place on his hands and knees, in search of the hole in the roof, which he knew, on Raggles' authority, was there.
It was there, at the very end of the gable: a little manhole, just big enough to let a small body through to clear the gutter, and no more.
"Hurrah, old man!" shouted Heathcote, in a whisper, to his follower, who still lingered at the trap-door.

"I've got it.