ds and shivered. The circle in which Evalina
moved had not much sense of humor.

One Saturday evening St. Ursula's School was in an unusually social
mood. Evalina was holding a ghost party in her room in the East Wing;
Nancy Lee had invited her ten dearest friends to a birthday spread in
Center; the European History class was celebrating the completion of the
Thirty-Years War by a molasses-candy pull in the kitchen; and Kid McCoy
was conducting a potato race down the length of the South Corridor--the
entrance fee a postage stamp, the prize sealed up in a large bandbox and
warranted to be worth a quarter.

Patty, who was popular, had been invited to all four of the functions.
She had declined Nancy's spread, because Mae Van Arsdale, her particular
enemy, was invited; but had accepted the other invitations, and was
busily spending the evening as an itinerant guest.

She carried her potato, insecurely balanced on a teaspoon, over one
table and under another, through a hoop suspended from the ceiling, and
deposited it in the wastebasket at the end of the corridor, in exactly
two minutes and forty-seven seconds. (Kid McCoy had a stop-watch.) This
was far ahead of anyone else's record, and Patty lingered hopefully a
few minutes in the neighborhood of the bandbox; but a fresh inrush of
entries postponed the bestowal of the prize, so she left the judges to
settle the question at their leisure, and drifted on to Evalina's room.

She found it dark, except for the fitful blue flare of alcohol and salt
burning in a fudge pan. The guests were squatting about on sofa
cushions, looking decidedly spotty in the unbecoming light. Patty
silently dropped down on a vacant cushion, and lent polite attention to
Evalina, who at the moment held the floor.

"Well, you know, I had a very remarkable experience myself last summer.
Happening to visit a spiritualist camp, I attended a materializing
seance."

"What's that?" asked Rosalie Patton.

"A seance in which spirits appear to mediums in the material form they
occupied during life," Evalina condescendingly explained. Rosalie was
merely an invited guest. She did not belong to the inner cult.

"Oh!" said Rosalie, vaguely enlightened.

"I didn't really expect anything to happen," Evalina continued, "and I
was just thinking how foolish I was to have wasted that dollar, when the
medium shut her eyes and commenced to tremble. She said she saw the
spirit of a beautiful young girl who had pass