"Makes me think of a snake charmer I saw once," whispered Monty Stark to Littlejohn.
"Ssh! Luna's cryin'! Did you ever see the beat? Alfy Babcock, stop snivellin' as if you was at a first class funeral!" returned master Smith, himself swallowing rather hard as he happened to think of his mother bringing in her own firewood.
Luna had reached the spot directly before Dorothy and was on her knees looking up with a timid, fascinated stare. Her small hands were so tightly clasped that their large veins seemed bursting, and great tears chased one another down her pink, wrinkled cheeks. Her close cropped head was thrown back and her back was toward the windows over which no curtains had been drawn. In her gay frock, which firelight and lamplight touched to a brilliant flame color, she must have appeared to one beyond the panes like a suppliant child begging pardon for some grave misdoing.
Suddenly Alfaretta screamed, and Molly Breckenridge promptly echoed her; then bounded to Dorothy's side and snatched the violin from her hands.
"Stop it, Dolly, stop it! I couldn't help doing that, for in another minute you'd have had me and--and everybody crazy! What made you----"
"Why, Alfaretta! Whatever is the matter? Why do you stand like that, pointing out into the night as if you'd seen a ghost?" demanded Jane Potter, going to her schoolmate and shaking her vigorously. "Don't yell again. It's--it's more frightful to hear you than it was to be locked up in that hidden chamber, with a spring-locked trap shut between you and liberty." Which was the only admission this self-contained young person ever gave that she had once known fear.
Alfy gulped, shivered, and slowly answered:
"So I did. It--was a ghost. Or--or--just the same as one! A--lookin'--a lookin' right through the window--with his face--big and white--He--he wore a hat----"
"Wise ghost! Not to cavort around bare-headed on a damp September night!" cried Monty, as much to reassure his own shaken nerves as those of the mountain girl.
"Dorothy's music was so strange--weird you might say--that she's made us all feel spooky; but we have no apparitions at Deerhurst, let me tell you," said Herbert, consolingly.
"Huh! You may say what you like, but that one apparited all right. I seen it with my very own eyes and nobody else's!" retorted Alfaretta, with such decision and twisting of good English that those who heard her laughed loudly.