After a while the ghosts removed their sheets and pillow-cases and became human beings once more, and the side shows, as Percy called them, began. Every girl at the party bobbed for an apple, except Belle Rogers, who declined emphatically. But those who remembered the red rubber curlers understood her reasons for not wishing to wet her aureole of golden hair.
Fannie Alta plunged her face and neck into the tub with a reckless laugh, and spotted her pretty dress without a quiver of regret.
Nancy, in a little room hung in black in a remote corner of the attic, held a lighted candle over her head, while she looked fearfully in the glass and combed her hair. For just a breathing space a boy’s fair, ruddy face passed across the mirror and disappeared.
With a little shriek, Nancy looked quickly over her shoulder, but she was entirely alone.
Billie went rather later than the others to try her fortune in the mirror room. She had lingered along with a laughing, teasing circle around the apple plungers, and, seeing Nancy come out of the mirror room alone, she strolled over there. Nancy explained what she was to do, and left her alone to her fate.
“Did you see any one, Nancy?” laughed Billie incredulously.
“Yes,” she whispered mysteriously, “I did; but I wasn’t frightened because——”
“Because what?” demanded Billie, pinching her friend’s round cheek.
“Because—it wasn’t a person who would frighten any one,” answered Nancy, with a laugh, as she tripped away to the next side show, from whence issued suppressed screams and howls which were explained when she pulled the curtain and a skeleton jumped at her.
In the meantime, Billie had gone into the mirror room alone. She stood looking gravely at herself in the glass, while she ran a comb through her smooth locks with one hand and held a candle with the other. She seemed to have waited a good while for the apparition which was supposed to appear to show its face.