"I say, Magsie, you must not tell anybody, you know," said Tom, "else I shall get fifty lines."
"Is it alive?" said Maggie, thinking that Tom kept a ferret.
"Oh, I shan't tell you," said he. "Now you go into that corner and hide your face while I reach it out," he added, as he locked the bedroom door behind them. "I'll tell you when to turn round. You mustn't squeal out, you know."
"Oh, but if you frighten me, I shall," said Maggie, beginning to look rather serious.
"You won't be frightened, you silly thing," said Tom. "Go and hide your face, and mind you don't peep."
"Of course I shan't peep," said Maggie disdainfully; and she buried her face in the pillow like a person of strict honour.
But Tom looked round warily as he walked to the closet; then he stepped into the narrow space, and almost closed the door. Maggie kept her face buried until Tom called out, "Now, then, Magsie!"
Nothing but very careful study could have enabled Tom to present so striking a figure as he did to Maggie when she looked up. With some burnt cork he had made himself a pair of black eyebrows that met over his nose, and were matched by a blackness about the chin. He had wound a red handkerchief round his cloth cap to give it the air of a turban, and his red comforter across his breast as a scarf—an amount of red which, with the frown on his brow, and the firmness with which he grasped a real sword, as he held it with its point resting on the ground, made him look very fierce and bloodthirsty indeed.
Maggie looked bewildered for a moment, and Tom enjoyed that moment keenly; but in the next she laughed, clapped her hands together, and said, "O Tom, you've made yourself like Bluebeard at the show."
It was clear she had not been struck with the presence of the sword—it was not unsheathed. Her foolish mind required a more direct appeal to its sense of the terrible; and Tom prepared for his master-stroke. Frowning fiercely, he (carefully) drew the sword—a real one—from its sheath and pointed it at Maggie.