d
sometimes burying her head in her pillow. Suddenly she sat up in bed,
with wide-open, terror-stricken eyes. On the opposite wall there
gleamed a strange, dancing light, which appeared and disappeared and
reappeared again, flickering faintly from floor to ceiling. There
seemed no explainable origin for it, and Evelyn's mind at once turned
to the supernatural. A silly maidservant at home had been accustomed to
ply her with ghost stories, all of which now recurred to her memory.
What was it, that unnatural, luminous halo on the opposite wall? It was
moving nearer to her, and had almost reached the curtain of her
cubicle, when, with a choking little gasp, she sprang out of bed, and
darting into the corridor ran shrieking upstairs, her one idea being to
escape from the mysterious apparition.

Her screams not only roused all the girls on the higher rooms, but
brought up Vivian Holmes, who had been crossing the hall at the moment,
and felt it her duty as monitress to go and investigate.

"What's all this noise about?" she asked. "Evelyn, what's the matter?
Has anything frightened you?"

"It's something on my wall," panted Evelyn; "something white, that
moves."

"What was it like?"

"I don't know--I can't describe it."

"Perhaps it was a ghost," said Honor, in a hollow voice; "they come
softly, this way," and, pulling a horrible face, she moved slowly
forward with a gliding motion, her white night-dress completing the
illusion.

Trembling from head to foot, Evelyn turned and clung to the monitress.

"Stop that, Honor!" exclaimed Vivian sharply. "It's a wicked thing to
frighten anybody. Come along, Evie! I'll go with you to your room, and
we'll try to find out what this mysterious 'something' is. Go back to
bed at once, all the rest of you!"

After making a thorough inspection of No. 4, Vivian found that the
uncanny light was, after all, very easy of explanation. It was nothing
but the reflection from a lamp outside, and the swaying of the blind
had been responsible for the movement. Having shown Evelyn the
unromantic origin of her spectre, the monitress left her, apparently
pacified, and went downstairs.

In the upper rooms all was soon in absolute stillness. The girls took
Vivian's advice and retired to bed again, laughing at having been
disturbed for so trivial a cause.

"Evelyn Fletcher is a goose!" said Flossie Taylor. "She'd run away from
her own shadow."

"She is rather silly," agreed Maisie Talbot. "I'