"But we want Madeline to be the ghost," said a big Miss Sebright, ten or eleven years old.
"She's always ghost," said Marian.
"To be sure; it will be much better," said Miss Furnival. "I only offered my poor services hoping to be useful. No Banquo that ever lived could leave a worse ghost behind him than I should prove."
It ended in there being two ghosts. It had become quite impossible to rob Miss Furnival of her promised part, and Madeline could not refuse to solve the difficulty in this way without making more of the matter than it deserved. The idea of two ghosts was delightful to the children, more especially as it entailed two large dishes full of raisins, and two blue fires blazing up from burnt brandy. So the girls went out, not without proffered assistance from the gentlemen, and after a painfully long interval of some fifteen or twenty minutes,—for Miss Furnival's back hair would not come down and adjust itself into ghostlike lengths with as much readiness as that of her friend,—they returned bearing the dishes before them on large trays. In each of them the spirit was lighted as they entered the schoolroom door, and thus, as they walked in, they were illuminated by the dark-blue flames which they carried.
"Oh, is it not grand?" said Marian, appealing to Felix Graham.
"Uncommonly grand," he replied.
"And which ghost do you think is the grandest? I'll tell you which ghost I like the best,—in a secret, you know; I like aunt Mad the best, and I think she's the grandest too."
"And I'll tell you in a secret that I think the same. To my mind she is the grandest ghost I ever saw in my life."
"Is she indeed?" asked Marian, solemnly, thinking probably that her new friend's experience in ghosts must be extensive. However that might be, he thought that as far as his experience in women went, he had never seen anything more lovely than Madeline Staveley dressed in a long white sheet, with a long bit of white cambric pinned round her face.
And it may be presumed that the dress altogether is not unbecoming when accompanied by blue flames, for Augustus Staveley and Lucius Mason thought the same thing of Miss Furnival, whereas Peregrine Orme did not know whether he was standing on his head or his feet as he looked at Miss Staveley. Miss Furnival may possibly have had some inkling of this when she offered to undertake the task, but I protest that such was not the case with Madeline. There was no second thought in her mind when she first declined the ghosting, and afterwards undertook the part. No wish to look beautiful in the eyes of Felix Graham had come to her—at any rate as yet; and as to Peregrine Orme, she had hardly thought of his existence. "By heavens!" said Peregrine to himself, "she is the most beautiful creature that I ever saw;" and then he began to speculate within his own mind how the idea might be received at The Cleeve.