“I suppose this booth isn’t in working order any longer,” she thought, as she laid down the comb, when suddenly from the deep shadows reflected in the glass she made out the outline of a face.
Billie smiled. She had been prepared to recognize one of her friends, but the smile faded from her lips; she put down the candle quickly and faced about. The black curtain forming the wall of the little room was still quivering, but no one was there.
She ran out hurriedly and looked about her. All the boys and girls were dancing the barn dance, and the attic had become very cheerful and gay it seemed to her in the brief moment in which she had tried her fortune in the mirror room.
“It was just a foolish, nervous notion,” she said to herself, turning to meet Merry Brown, who was looking for her to be his partner in the dance. “But that beaked nose and that wicked eye so close to it,” her thoughts continued. “Could I have been mistaken?”
“Are there any strangers here to-night?” she asked Merry, as they danced down the room together.
“Not a single stranger,” he replied. “Only the High School crowd.”
When the dance was over, they filed in a long, laughing procession down the three flights of steps to supper, and there was nothing spectral or gruesome about the gay party which gathered around Mrs. St. Clair’s long table. Billie tried to talk and sing with the others and laugh at Roly Poly McLane and Percy, who recited an absurd dialogue they had prepared beforehand in which Roly Poly took the part of a fat, old man and Percy a thin old woman. But all the time she kept asking herself:
“Did I see him, or was it just my imagination?”
CHAPTER XVI.—A STRAY GHOST.
When the front door closed after the departing merry-makers and the sound of the last wheels died away down the avenue, the guests of the house party filed slowly up to bed. Mrs. St. Clair, at the head of the stairs, kissed each of the girls good-night and shook hands with the boys. And, as a final token of their regard, before turning in, the boys trooped from door to door, singing, “Good-night, ladies,” with Charlie accompanying on his mouth organ.