The girls started, and Billie, drawing some bushes aside, peered out in the direction of the sound. What she saw made her draw in her breath sharply and Laura and Vi drew closer, looking over her shoulder.
Ten ghost-like figures were coming quickly toward them across the moonlight-flooded lawn that surrounded Three Towers Hall.
It looked as though each figure had draped itself from head to foot in a flowing sheet with places for the eyes and nose and mouth rudely cut out. The girls, watching in half-frightened silence, were reminded of the "Ku-Klux Klan" of post Civil War days, which they had seen once or twice in moving pictures.
"Do you suppose it's the girls dressed up like that?" Laura whispered, beginning to wish herself back in the security of her dormitory.
"Of course. Who else could it be?" said Billie, trying to make her voice sound natural when the skin on the back of her neck was beginning to crawl. "For goodness sake, don't let them think you're scared, whatever you do," she whispered fiercely, as the first of the white-draped figures reached the woods. "That's probably just what they're trying to do."
The leader of the "ghosts," as they had already dubbed them in their minds, came to a halt just a few feet in front of the chums, and her followers drew up behind her.
Then they stood there, motionless as the trees around them, looking at Billie and Laura and Vi through those ghastly white masks until the girls thought they must scream.
They afterward found out that this was the "silence test," that unless the girls passed this first test they were unworthy to belong to the "Ghost Club." And passing the test consisted of doing what the girls were doing now—although they did not know it—just standing still and waiting for the head "ghost" to speak.
And finally, when the girls felt that they could no longer stand it but must dash out of the dark woods and away from the ghostly, motionless figures, the "head ghost" spoke.
"We have come," it said, "to ask you a question."