“You look like a mixture of Dolly Varden and Sweet Lavender, with a dash of Maid Marian thrown in,” decided Verity.
“I hope my hair’ll keep in curl! There’s rather a damp feeling in the air,” fluttered Fil anxiously.
“You could fly indoors, and give it a twist with the tongs, if it gets very limp,” suggested Nora.
Nora herself was going as a personification of “The Kitchen.” Her skirt was draped with dusters and dishcloths, she wore a small dish-cover as a hat, clothes-pegs were suspended round her neck as a necklace, and she brandished a rolling-pin in her hand.
“I’m bound to be something comic,” she assured the others. “I’d never keep my face straight for a romantic character. I could no more live up to Lady Jane Grey than I could fly! She’s above me altogether!”
Verity, who had borrowed a Dutch costume slightly too small for her, was trying to squeeze her proportions into the tight velvet bodice, and looked dubiously at the sabots.
“I’ll never be able to dance in those!” she decided. “I’ll put them on to start with, and then kick them off and slip on my sandals instead. They’re the most extraordinary clumpy things in the world, I feel like a cat walking in walnut shells!”
Ingred’s toilet progressed very favorably till it came to the stage of coloring her face. She was not quite sure as to the best means of obtaining a Red Indian complexion. First she tried rubbing it with soil from the garden, but that was a painful process which almost scraped the skin from her cheeks. So she washed her face and used cocoa. She mixed it in a cup and dabbed it over, but it would not go on smoothly, and the result was so patchy and hideous that once more she brought out her sponge and wiped it off. At that point Verity came to the rescue, smeared the poor cheeks (already sore through such ill-treatment) with vanishing cream, then powdered on some dry cocoa, which certainly gave a dusky and non-European aspect to her features, especially when combined with the feather headdress. Her dark hair, plaited in two long tails, completed the illusion. The girls held a complacent review of their toilets, then walked downstairs with caution, for Nora’s dish-cover was difficult to balance as a hat, and Verity’s heels kept slipping out of the sabots. Fil’s ringlets, alas! were already beginning to untwist, and Ingred’s jumper, put on in too big a hurry, showed symptoms of splitting down the seam. There was no time for repairs of any sort, however. They were five minutes late, and the rest of the company were assembled on the lawn. The boarders from the hostel, together with mistresses and seniors who had come by invitation, made a total of more than fifty persons, all in fancy dress.
These gay costumes were a pretty sight against the background of trees and bushes and flowerbeds. The sun had set, leaving a yellow glow in the sky, and the Chinese lanterns were beginning to glow in the gathering twilight. It was certainly a varied crowd; all centuries had met together. A Japanese damsel walked arm-in-arm with a Lancashire witch; an Italian peasant hob-a-nobbed with “The Queen of Sheba,” a Spanish lady was talking to “Old Mother Hubbard,” while such characters as “A Medicine Bottle,” or “An Aeroplane” rubbed shoulders with an “Egyptian Princess” or “Dick Whittington’s Cat.”
Miss Burd, garbed appropriately as Chaucer’s Prioress, received the company at the top of the sundial steps, looking, in the opinion of the Foursome League, quite sufficiently like the ghost of yesterday to have justified squeals had they met her alone. When the ceremony of introduction was over, the guests dispersed about the lawn, Miss Perry struck up a waltz on the piano, and the fun began. Dancing on the grass, in the growing darkness, with the Chinese lanterns sending out a soft but uncertain radiance overhead, was a new experience to most of the school. It was difficult not to step on to the flowerbeds, or to brush against the bushes. Trailing garments were decidedly in the way, and came to grief. There was a delirious sort of Eastern feeling about it—a kind of combination of The Thousand and One Nights and the Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyam. The Abbey tower for once seemed out of place, and ought to have changed miraculously into a pagoda or a minaret.
It was after the girls had been dancing for some little time that Ingred first noticed a couple whom she did not remember to have seen before. They followed persistently in her steps, and even gently bumped into her once or twice, thus compelling her attention. She looked at them, considerably mystified. One was attired in Early Victorian Costume, with a crinoline, a little tippet, and a poke bonnet, from which peeped some bewitching ringlets; the other, in a gorgeous Turkish costume, was enveloped in a shimmering gauze veil.
“Who are those?” Ingred asked her partner.
But Verity could not tell.
In the twilight it was, of course, easy to make mistakes, but Ingred began to have a strong suspicion that neither of the mysterious partners belonged to the school. They were certainly not members of the Fifth or Sixth. Perhaps some of the Juniors had forced themselves in? No, they were too tall for Juniors.
“Perhaps they are ghosts!” shivered Verity.
“Ghosts don’t bump into people. These are real substantial flesh and
