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.
“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.”