“It lightened, that’s why we hid.  Mammy Chloe thed if you go get in a dark plathe on a pile of featheths, no lightnin’ can hurt you.  Mammy Chloe always puth uth in the middle of her feather-bed.  Tho me and thithter took a thofa pillow and got under the thofa and shut our eyeth tight.  We wath hot,” she added, gravely, “and tho wath the puppieth, but the lightnin’ couldn’t get uth.”

The laugh that went up from the amused listeners aroused both the twins so thoroughly that they joined in without knowing what they were laughing about.  Then Alec and Walker carried them triumphantly on their shoulders to the wagonette, and once more the party started homeward.  This time they moved off without singing, but from the gate came back three cheers for the twins, then three cheers for the Little Colonel, who had found them.  Once started to cheering, somebody proposed three for the pillow-case party, and so lustily did they give them, that an old rooster, awakening from sleep as the wheels creaked by, thought it the call of some giant chanticleer, and promptly crowed an answering challenge, that was echoed by every cock in the Valley.

CHAPTER XIII.

MORE MEASLES.

It seemed to Betty that that night would never end.  It was after midnight before the house grew quiet.  Then, whenever she closed her eyes, she could see those ghostly figures dancing before her in a long, white wavering line.  After awhile she gave up the attempt to sleep, and lay with her eyes wide open, staring into the darkness, alert, and quivering at the slightest sound.

“I don’t know what makes me so nervous,” she thought.  “I feel as if I should fly, and the dark seems so horrible, as if it was full of creepy, crawling things, with horns and claws.”

A beetle boomed against the window, striking the pane with a heavy thud.  She drew the sheet over her head and shivered.  “Maybe if I’d read awhile it would make me sleepy,” she thought, and, slipping softly out of bed, she groped her way across the room in the dark to the dressing-table.  Lighting a candle in one of the crystal candlesticks that always reminded her of twisted icicles, she put it on a stand beside her bed.  The light flickered unsteadily, but she piled the pillows up behind her and settled herself to read.

It was a new book that she was greatly interested in, and before long she was so deep in the story that she never noticed how the time was flying.  Instead of bringing sleep to her eyes, it seemed to drive it farther and farther away.  The candle burned lower and lower, but she never noticed it, and read on by its unsteady light until she heard the hall clock strike four.  The candle was flickering in its socket, and the June dawn was beginning to streak the sky.  Her eyes smarted and burned, and ached with a dull throbbing pain.