“I wouldn’t care to be here alone,” admitted Janet; “but, as we’re all together I—I don’t—think I shall mind it—even if the Ghostly Mystery materializes.”
It was a long wait, and the three girls beguiled it at times by whispering together, more through desire to hear the sound of their own voices than because they had anything important to say. One o’clock arrived at last. Marion could read the face of her watch under the starlight. Another half hour dragged wearily away.
“I fear we shall encounter no adventure to-night,” Marion was saying, when Phœbe seized her arm and drew her back into the shadow.
“Hush!” she murmured, and pointed an arm toward the turnstile.
Two hearts, at least, were beating very fast now, for the long-expected ghost was at last in sight, gliding silently past the turnstile. Well, not exactly “gliding,” they decided, watching intently. It was not a very healthy looking ghost, and to their astonishment was entering the graveyard with shuffling, uneven steps. Of course it should have suddenly appeared from some tomb, as every well regulated ghost is supposed to do.
“The Mystery seems rather clumsy, Marion,” said Janet in an excited whisper.
“Isn’t it carrying something?” asked Phœbe.
“Yes; a weight of some sort in each hand,” was Marion’s composed reply. “The weights are as white as the ghost itself. Queer; isn’t it, girls?”
Glancing neither to right nor left the apparition slowly made its way into the graveyard and advanced to the big square mausoleum erected as the future abiding place of Jonathan Eliot. The white-robed figure seemed bent and feeble.
“Come!” said Marion; “let us surround it and play ghost ourselves.”