Geraldine stopped, because something like a whirlwind suddenly descended the stairs and stampeded towards them. It resolved itself into Diana—Diana with scarlet cheeks, shining eyes, and face simply bubbling over with excitement.
"Hallo! I say!" she jodelled, "What do you think?" Then she saw Geraldine, and halted dead.
"Come here!" commanded the head girl. "I want to talk to you too about this absurd spook scare. It's mostly among you intermediates, and the sooner you get it out of your silly heads the better. Pity you can't find something more sensible to talk about. Why don't you read, and fill up your empty brains? There are heaps of good books in the library, if you'd only get them out. You spend all your spare time gossiping."
"We do read!" retorted Diana, taking up the cudgels for the maligned intermediates. "I've just read The Monastery, and that's all about a ghost called 'The White Lady of Avenel'. It's grand where she rides the sacristan's mule down the river and sings:
'Merrily swim we; the moon shines bright.
Good luck to your fishing! Whom watch ye to-night?'
There are heaps and loads of ghost tales in the guide book and in Chadwick's Northern Antiquities, and those are all books Miss Todd told me I might read. She said they were 'educational'."
"She didn't mean you to take the ghosts seriously, though, any more than you'd believe in the gods of Greece because you were learning classical literature. Why, you'll tell me next that you expect to see the fairies."
"I'm not sure that I don't!"
"Then you're a bigger goose than I thought you. Really, at fourteen! I'm astonished at all of you. You don't see me running squealing away from supposed ghosts. Don't let me catch you being such little idiots again."