But they didn’t.

CHAPTER XVII

“Behold the ghost of Lenox hall!”

Dozia insisted on carrying the “tin rompers” down stairs in her hands and donning them in a convenient place to avoid possible disaster.

“Yours are shorter and jauntier than mine, Jane,” she argued.  “Besides, you have a better figure for tonlets.  Come along, I’ll stop at the landing and buckle into the things.  Give me a couple of chains.  Don’t they chime beautifully?”

“Wait a minute,” Jane ordered.  “I just discovered the usual slip of paper.”  She was extracting it from an armlet.  “It’s quite new and very modern, in fact regular typewriting kind—­”

“Oh, tuck it away and come along,” Dozia moaned.  “I hear the horde howling and the sooner I get this stuff off the better I’ll feel.  Pickles! but it’s heavy.”

Jane folded the slip of paper and made it secure some place, then they proceeded to forge their way into the recreation room on the second floor, whither the students had been hastily summoned by the matron.

“Now I know how the baby tanks felt in the big war,” panted Jane, who was valiantly leading the way.  “I mean those big human machines that rolled over the earth and ploughed things down, as they went.”

“Say, Janie, just wait a minute,” begged Dozia at the first landing.  “This looks a little like a joke but who is the joker?  Who got up in that place and rattled these nightly?  Also, who let out that wild scream we heard on that first night?” She was talking quickly and in a subdued voice.  “We may be breaking the spell by raiding the secret chamber, but suppose the old spook breaks out in a new spot?”

“I’ve thought of all that,” confessed Jane, her smile threatening to unhinge the visor.  “But we must give the youngsters their show first.  The details will be lost in their joy of rescue.”

“They come!  They come!” called out Miss Gifford in an uncertain treble.  She had been waiting to give this signal.

“Land, I’m losing the panties,” groaned Dozia, trying to hold up the tonlets with one hand while she made wild grabs all over the outfit with the other.  Dozia’s artistic effect was surely in jeopardy.  Majestically the two big, black walnut doors swung back, and the crusaders passed between them.

“Behold the ghosts of Lenox Hall!” cried out Jane tragically.

“Behold, behold!” echoed Dozia, raising her arm in its chained gusset and attempting to salute at the peak of her helmet.

Shouts from the girls spoiled further efforts at the theatrical, and presently it was no longer a question of holding the old armor in place, but rather that of getting out of it safely, for what those freshmen didn’t say and do to those ghosts!

“Nothing but strung up dishrags,” sneered Maud Leslie.  “They must have looted every hardware store in town for these.  Look!”