Everybody was very merry and happy. The old darkies who had waited on the tables at Hilltop since it started were immaculate and grinning in white aprons and red bandanas.
“And now for the surprise,” Miss Jenks said as they left the table after the nuts and fruit.
The girls hurried upstairs. Gwen came into the Twins’s room to help them, and Poppy stayed with Sally and Daphne.
At last everything was ready. The stage was set for the first tableaux, and the lights in the ballroom were out.
The curtain rose slowly to discover Sally, dressed as a boy in a velvet suit, a broad, white lace collar and shoes with big buckles. She was posed on a rock with the woodland screen behind her, and she looked so like the first owner of Hilltop, whose painting hung in the library, that Miss Hull and the rest of the faculty gasped.
The next picture was a copy of another painting,—Ann and Prue, dressed in long, very full skirts that showed frilled pantelets beneath them, stood side by side before a tiny grave. They were “Delia and Constance Hull beside the grave of their favorite spaniel.”
Prue was kneeling on a tack in the green denim floor cover, and her knee was so paralyzed after the curtain fell for the third time, that Sally had to lift her up. She limped for a week.
The Twins came next in two scenes from The Haunted Balcony. In the first, Phyllis, dressed in a soft white robe, sat with her chin cupped in her hands and her eyes looked out toward the rising sun. At the back of the stage behind a net curtain, to give the effect of a vision, were Gladys and Janet. They wore black satin knee breeches and white shirts, open at the throat. They held old pearl-handled duelling pistols pointed at each other’s hearts.
The curtain fell, to rise again on the sad scene of the poor demented lady, about to throw herself from the balcony. Attendants were carrying in the crumpled body of her lover. Gladys looked very dead, while her brother stalked behind, his arms folded, a smile of triumph on his youthful face. Gwen was imposing as the old doctor carrying a very dilapidated bag.
The next illustrated the story of Mrs. Fanmore Hull’s bravery. Poppy was seated before a spinning wheel, in a soft gray dress and cap and kerchief. At the door three villainous looking bandits peered in at her. One had a patch over his eye and they all looked very rakish.