cidedly.

"Would it?" says Molly, diffidently.

"I have a first-rate plan; I can make you both look so like ghosts that
you would frighten the unsuspecting into fits."

"First, Plantagenet, before we go any further into your ghostly
schemes, answer me this: _is_ there any gunpowder about it?"

"None." Laughing. "You just dress yourselves in white sheets, or that,
and hold a plate in your hands filled with whiskey and salt, and--there
you are. You have no idea of the tremendous effect. You will be more
like a corpse than anything you can imagine."

"How cheerful!" murmurs Cecil. "You make me long for the 'sheets and
that.'"

"Do the whiskey and the salt ever blow up?" asks Molly, cautiously.
"Because if so----"

"No, they don't; of course not. Say nothing about it to the others, and
we shall astonish them by and by. It is an awfully becoming thing,
too," says Potts, with a view to encouragement; "you will look like
marble statues."

"We are trusting you again," says Cecil, regarding him fixedly.
"Plantagenet, if you should again be our undoing----"

"Not the slightest fear of a _fiasco_ this time," says Potts,
comfortably.

CHAPTER XXIII.

"Here's such a coil! Come, what says Romeo?"

--Shakespeare.

As eleven o'clock strikes, any one going up the stairs at Herst would
have stopped with a mingled feeling of terror and admiration at one
particular spot, where, in a niche, upon a pedestal, a very goddess
stands.

It is Molly, clad in white, from head to heel, with a lace scarf
twisted round her head and shoulders, and with one bare arm uplifted,
while with the other she holds an urn-shaped vase beneath her face,
from which a pale-blue flame arises.

Her eyes, larger, deeper, bluer than usual, are fixed with sad and
solemn meaning upon space. She scarcely seems to breathe; no quiver
disturbs her frame, so intensely does she listen for a coming footstep.
In her heart she hopes it may be Luttrell's.

The minutes pass. Her arm is growing tired, her eyes begin to blink
against her will; she is on the point of throwing up the game,
descending from her pedestal, and regaining her own room, when a
footfall recalls her to herself and puts her on her mettle.

Nearer it comes,--still nearer, until it stops altogether. Molly does
not dare turn to see who it is. A moment later, a wild cry, a smothered
groan, falls upon her ear, and, turning her head, terrified, she sees
her grandfathe