If Miss Lawrence was in Mary's confidence she had no intention of betraying it; and there was nothing to do but wait for eight o'clock, the hour which Mary had mentioned in her invitations. Promptly on the moment all those bidden to the hair-raising made a rush for Mary's room.
"She hasn't come back from taking dinner with her mother," said Helen.
"Her transom is dark."
But "come in, children," called Mary, sociably, and opening the door just wide enough to admit one girl at a time she disclosed a room absolutely dark save for a gleam of light from a Turkish lantern in one corner.
"Goodness!" cried Betty, who went in first. "What am I running into? Oh, it's a skeleton."
"I'm all mixed up with a snake," added Katherine. "I feel my hair rising already."
"Girls, I want you to meet my mother," said Mary, briskly.
"Here I am," called a sweet voice from the shadows. "Wouldn't you better turn on the lights for a moment, daughter?"
"No, indeed," retorted Mary, firmly. "They're nothing to see, dear, I assure you, but if you insist on seeing them you can all go across to Laurie's room and come back after you've had a general inspection."
So everybody filed over to Marion Lawrence's room, where it was discovered that Mary's mother was, as Betty Wales put it, "a perfect little darling." She was small, like Mary, and she looked so young that Katherine gravely asked Mary if she was quite sure she wasn't palming off a sister on them instead of a mother. She entered into all the absurdities of the hair-raising, which proved to be only a particularly diverting sort of ghost party, with as much zest as any of the girls, and her ghost stories were the feature of the evening.
"You see, dear," explained Mary, when the lights were finally turned on and the hair-raising had resolved itself into a spread, "you see I had a hair-raising because you tell ghost stories so well. Why, ever since I read your letter I've been planning how I should show you off—Oh, mother, it's too good to keep." And Mary regaled her mother with the story of the neglected book-bill.