"Tell you what," he says, with much geniality, "it feels like Christmas, and crackers, and small games, don't it? I feel up to anything. And I have a capital idea in my head. Wouldn't it be rather a joke to frighten the others?"
"It would," says Cecil, decidedly.
"Would it?" says Molly, diffidently.
"I have a first-rate plan; I can make you both look so like ghosts that you would frighten the unsuspecting into fits."
"First, Plantagenet, before we go any further into your ghostly schemes, answer me this: is there any gunpowder about it?"
"None." Laughing. "You just dress yourselves in white sheets, or that, and hold a plate in your hands filled with whiskey and salt, and—there you are. You have no idea of the tremendous effect. You will be more like a corpse than anything you can imagine."
"How cheerful!" murmurs Cecil. "You make me long for the 'sheets and that.'"
"Do the whiskey and the salt ever blow up?" asks Molly, cautiously. "Because if so——"
"No, they don't; of course not. Say nothing about it to the others, and we shall astonish them by and by. It is an awfully becoming thing, too," says Potts, with a view to encouragement; "you will look like marble statues."
"We are trusting you again," says Cecil, regarding him fixedly. "Plantagenet, if you should again be our undoing——"