"How perfectly glorious!" cried Laura, clapping her hands with delight.
"Tell us about it, Billie. What made you say it was haunted?"
Then did Billie tell them all that her mother had told her about her inheritance and, if the truth be told, even added a few details of her own.
However that may have been, the fact remains that when she had finished the girls were as perfectly wild as Chet had been to visit the queer old place and, if need be, even confront its "ghosts!"
"Think!" cried Laura, clasping her hands rapturously. "Just think of being able to roam all over that romantic old place and pry into corners—"
"And get your hands dirty," interrupted Billie drily.
"Why, Billie," Laura stopped in her transports to regard her friend with wide eyes, "aren't you simply wild about the place too?"
"Oh, I suppose so," said Billie, adding as a shadow crossed her face: "The folks think I'm awful, all 'cept Chet, and I suppose I am—but I'd give the whole place, tunnels, spooky hallways, ghostly attic, and everything for just a few little hundred dollar bills."
The girls were silent for a few minutes, realizing that Billie's strange inheritance did not do a thing toward solving the old problems of the broken statue and of going to boarding school.
Then Violet, who was always thinking up some happy way out of a difficulty, gave a little bounce in the swing.
"How do we know," she cried, as the girls looked at her half hopefully, "but what you could sell some of the furniture in the old house and get enough to pay for the statue?"