“I don’t see how you can play any gruesome Hallowe’en tricks in this house, Mrs. St. Clair,” said Billie later at the dinner table. “It’s the abode of cheerfulness. Look at this dining room, for instance. A skull and crossbones wouldn’t even look dismal against this white wainscoting and these pale yellow walls.”

“She’s trying to pump you, mother,” put in Percy. “Now don’t tell her anything.”

Mrs. St. Clair smiled archly. How pretty she looked, Billie thought, in her pink crepe dress, with a beautiful collar of pearls around her throat. Nothing would induce the widow to wear black, and, after a year or two of mourning, she had gone back to colors and cheerfulness.

“He has got some big surprises for you, my dear. I’ll only tell you this much. It will be quite as ghastly as you could possibly desire, and I hope nobody is wearing any clothes that will matter. Your dress, Miss Alta, I am afraid will spot if you do all the things Percy is planning for this evening. What a lovely frock, by the way. I think I have never seen a more beautiful dress for a young girl.”

All eyes were fastened on Fannie’s dress, and there was general surprise among the girls to see that Fannie was wearing an exquisite gown of pale blue satin with an over-dress of blue gauze, edged with narrow silver fringe. In her hair was a wreath of pink roses.

She was quite unembarrassed under the scrutiny of all these people, and smiled complacently at Mrs. St. Clair.

Nobody had taken much notice of Belle until now. They had supposed she had kept so unusually quiet because she was not in her own “set,” as she loved to call her coterie of seven. But to those who were familiar with her, it was plain that something had happened. She did not seem herself. Her eyes had a strange gray look to them. Two little white dents appeared on either side of her nose and her lips were shrunk into pale, narrow lines. But that was not all. Were they dreaming or was this the first of Percy’s Hallowe’en jokes? The beautiful, proud Belle was wearing a faded yellow muslin.

She had tried to cover her shoulders with a little blue scarf, but it was impossible to deceive the sharp eyes of her schoolmates.

“Nobody’s clothes will be hurt, Mother,” put in Percy, feeling somehow that a cloud had fallen on the company, although he did not know enough about girls’ clothes to take in this remarkable change in Belle’s appearance. “Remember that this is a ghost party.”

“What is a ghost party?” demanded Fannie, suddenly becoming animated from the admiration she felt she had attracted.

“Everybody wears a sheet and pillow-case,” answered Percy, “and, for one thing, not a vestige of dress shows.”

A look of triumph came into Belle’s eyes at this and the two dents began to disappear.

“I hear the other people coming, so we had better get into our costumes if you are entirely through.”

“Come up to my room, girls. Percy will take care of the boys. Marie and I are commissioned to dress you up. I am obeying orders, you see,” said Mrs. St. Clair.

“And remember that you are supposed to be disguised,” called Percy. “Don’t give yourself away by giggling, Miss Nancy-Bell.”

“I’m sure I shan’t want to giggle if I’m dressed as a ghost,” answered Nancy, following the others up the steps.

Half an hour later a company of spectres invaded the halls and drawing room of Pine Lodge. There were silent ghosts and giggling ghosts, and a roly-poly ghost, who bumped against a thin ghost and knocked him flat and the thin ghost cried out:

“Oh, shades of departed Jumbo, don’t sit on me!”

Then all the ghosts laughed and one ghost danced a jig that had the shadow of a resemblance to the Fishers’ Horn Pipe.

Presently there was a long and mournful trumpet call from up in the very top of the house and a portly ghost who seemed to be holding up a train under her white cotton shroud said:

“Now, my dear spirits, we are all to go up, if you will be good enough to follow me,” and the whole troop of ghosts began moving in a spectral body up the front staircase.

There was a second long-drawn-out and despairing trump, and the phantom beckoned them to hurry up, with her plump, pretty hand, and remarked:

“My darling Percival is so impatient.”

Up the next staircase they trooped and finally up a narrow flight, at the top of which hung a black curtain with cabalistic signs painted on it in bright red.

Once past the curtain and there was a gasp of surprise and wonder. The great attic of Pine Lodge, which stretched over the entire house, had been transformed into a spirit dance hall. From the ceiling hung pumpkin jack-o-lanterns of every size. Plates of salt and alcohol were burning about the room, giving a ghastly greenish look to the picture. An old witch dressed in black, with a long broomstick, was stationed by a cauldron of melted lead, placed on a charcoal stove.

Repeating a cabalistic verse with incredible rapidity, which sounded something like:

“Burra, burra pie, cat’s eye, devil fry,
Singer, dinger, singer dinger, blood!”

the black witch dropped a spoonful of the lead into a bowl of water.

“Here is your fortune,” she said, in a sing-song voice to the nearest ghost.

“The lead has taken the shape of a letter. It brings news to you. It comes from over the water on a ship. The letter is about something round——”

“Money is round,” put in a tall ghost, standing near. “So are rings and necklaces——”

“There is trouble ahead,” went on the witch. “There is trouble before the letter ever reaches land.”

The ghost who was listening moved away quickly.

“Of course, it was just a coincidence,” she said to herself, “but I wonder who the person was who said that about rings and necklaces. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I wish I had never taken that box in charge.”

In another part of the room a red witch was engaged in launching little fortune sail boats, made of English walnuts, on a troubled sea in a tub.

There were four other witches about the attic telling fortunes with cards and in other ways, two gray ones, a white one, and a green one, and there was an enormous gray cat with electric eyes and a tail four feet long that curled up over its back. At last from behind a curtain came the strains of weird music, and the witches and the gray cat danced a quadrille, the witches riding on their broomsticks in a circle, leaping over the cat as they advanced down the middle and finally ending with a romp when all the ghosts joined in and danced together.

After a while the ghosts removed their sheets and pillow-cases and became human beings once more, and the side shows, as Percy called them, began. Every girl at the party bobbed for an apple, except Belle Rogers, who declined emphatically. But those who remembered the red rubber curlers understood her reasons for not wishing to wet her aureole of golden hair.

Fannie Alta plunged her face and neck into the tub with a reckless laugh, and spotted her pretty dress without a quiver of regret.

Nancy, in a little room hung in black in a remote corner of the attic, held a lighted candle over her head, while she looked fearfully in the glass and combed her hair. For just a breathing space a boy’s fair, ruddy face passed across the mirror and disappeared.

With a little shriek, Nancy looked quickly over her shoulder, but she was entirely alone.

Billie went rather later than the others to try her fortune in the mirror room. She had lingered along with a laughing, teasing circle around the apple plungers, and, seeing Nancy come out of the mirror room alone, she strolled over there. Nancy explained what she was to do, and left her alone to her fate.

“Did you see any one, Nancy?” laughed Billie incredulously.

“Yes,” she whispered mysteriously, “I did; but I wasn’t frightened because——”

“Because what?” demanded Billie, pinching her friend’s round cheek.

“Because—it wasn’t a person who would frighten any one,” answered Nancy, with a laugh, as she tripped away to the next side show, from whence issued suppressed screams and howls which were explained when she pulled the curtain and a skeleton jumped at her.

In the meantime, Billie had gone into the mirror room alone. She stood looking gravely at herself in the glass, while she ran a comb through her smooth locks with one hand and held a candle with the other. She seemed to have waited a good while for the apparition which was supposed to appear to show its face.

“I suppose this booth isn’t in working order any longer,” she thought, as she laid down the comb, when suddenly from the deep shadows reflected in the glass she made out the outline of a face.

Billie smiled. She had been prepared to recognize one of her friends, but the smile faded from her lips; she put down the candle quickly and faced about. The black curtain forming the wall of the little room was still quivering, but no one was there.

She ran out hurriedly and looked about her. All the boys and girls were dancing the barn dance, and the attic had become very cheerful and gay it seemed to her in the brief moment in which she had tried her fortune in the mirror room.

“It was just a foolish, nervous notion,” she said to herself, turning to meet Merry Brown, who was looking for her to be his partner in the dance. “But that beaked nose and that wicked eye so close to it,” her thoughts continued. “Could I have been mistaken?”

“Are there any strangers here to-night?” she asked Merry, as they danced down the room together.

“Not a single stranger,” he replied. “Only the High School crowd.”

When the dance was over, they filed in a long, laughing procession down the three flights of steps to supper, and there was nothing spectral or gruesome about the gay party which gathered around Mrs. St. Clair’s long table. Billie tried to talk and sing with the others and laugh at Roly Poly McLane and Percy, who recited an absurd dialogue they had prepared beforehand in which Roly Poly took the part of a fat, old man and Percy a thin old woman. But all the time she kept asking herself:

“Did I see him, or was it just my imagination?”