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"Here are the aprons," cried Kitty, at last. "See? They'll fit up close around the neck and hide the place where the muslin that covers our head is tied on."
"I'll paint the faces on you the last thing before we start," said Allison.
"Mercy me! Allison!" exclaimed Katie. "We can't walk down past the depot and the store rigged up that way, even if it is dark. Somebody might think we were escaped freaks, and chase us. We ought to wait till we get to the seminary before we dress."
"No, there won't be time then, and everybody will know it's only a Hallowe'en frolic. If Kitty wears her golf-cape and you wear mine, and pull the hoods away over your faces, nobody will notice. I'll not dress till afterward, for I'm not going to appear till the middle of the evening. I'm not going to go up to the gymnasium at all, but just glide around on the outskirts and lay a cold finger on some one now and then. I'll get a lump of ice out of the cooler if I can manage to slip into the dining-room. Now if you'll bring me the scissors I'll cut the muslin and fit it over your heads."
Mrs. Walton, sorry that her absence would deprive the girls of their anticipated Hallowe'en party, compensated for their disappointment as far as possible by ordering an unusually delicious little supper for them and their guest.
"Isn't it too tantalizing!" exclaimed Kitty, when Barbry had left the room for some hot biscuits. "Here's everything I like best, and I'm in such a hurry and so excited that I can hardly choke down a mouthful."
"Don't talk, then," commanded Allison. "Just eat !"
The meal proceeded in silence for a few moments, but the silence itself grew funny as they thought of the ludicrous figures they would soon present, and they began to giggle.
The giggles grew into shrieks of laughter a little later, when they had gone up-stairs, and the two rag dolls, all stuffed, painted, and dressed, leaned limply against the wall and leered at each other. Even their hands looked comical, covered in white woollen gloves, each finger held stiffly out from the other. After one glance Allison rolled on the bed, holding her sides, laughing and gasping in turn.
"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" she exclaimed, finally, sitting up and wiping her eyes and then going off into a fresh paroxysm of laughter as she looked at them again. "I never saw anything so funny in my life. The girls will simply shriek when they see you."
Norah and Barbry, sitting over their own supper, heard the laughing far down in the kitchen. They looked at each other and smiled, and then, as the contagious sound continued, laughed themselves. The merriment was irresistible. But a little later, busy with their preparations for their coming friends, they did not notice that the house grew strangely still, and that not another sound came from the rooms above all that evening.
Kitty's room adjoined Allison's. Bolting the door which opened into her mother's, on the inside, she passed through Allison's with Katie, and out into the hall. Then Allison locked her door on the outside and hid the key under the hall rug. Creeping down the stairs, they stole out at the side door, locked it after them, and hid the key inside a large flower-pot on the porch.
"That's safer than carrying it," said Allison. "We'd be sure to lose it, and then we would be in a pretty pickle."
The moon, overcast by shifting clouds, was just beginning to throw a faint, ghostly glimmer over the Valley as the girls hurried out.
"Let's go back way until we are past grandmother's gate," said Kitty. Edgewood, Mrs. MacIntyre's place, was just across from The Beeches, and some one was strolling up the avenue toward it. "Uncle Harry," whispered Allison, crouching down in the shadow of a tree until he had gone in.
Rustling along in the dry leaves, they passed the rear of the cottage next door, the manse, and the little stone church. That brought them out into the wide, open space below the ridge, where the lights gleamed from every window in the Soldiers' Home. The girls drew their hoods closer over their faces as they hurried across the churchyard, out through the iron gate into the road.
"It makes me think of the night we had a Hallowe'en party at the haunted house of Hartwell Hollow," said Katie, looking up at the bare branches overhead, which were beginning to toss in the rising wind. Then she clapped a white-gloved hand over her rag mouth to choke back a giggle. Kitty had begun holding her arms in the aimless fashion peculiar to rag dolls, and was walking along as if she had no bones.
"For goodness' sake, behave yourself," begged Allison. "Don't get us to laughing out here on the road!"
Kitty straightened up as they passed the deserted post-office, and they quickened their pace until they were safely beyond the store and the depot. A moment later they had passed through the woodland gate of Clovercroft, raced along the path below the ice-house, and were squeezing through the gap in the picket fence to the seminary grounds.