"If you cannot exhibit greater decorum, Potts, we shall be obliged to put your head in a bag," says Sir Penthony, severely. "I consider 'awfully' quite the correct word. What with the ivy and the gigantic size of those paper roses, the room presents quite a startling appearance." "Well, I'm sure they are far prettier than Lady Harriet Nitemair's; and she made such a fuss about hers last spring," says Cecil, rather injured. "Not to be named in the same day," declares Luttrell, who had not been at Lady Harriet Nitemair's. "Why, Tedcastle, you were not there; you were on your way home from India at that time." "Was I? By Jove! so I was. Never mind, I take your word for it, and stick to my opinion," replies Luttrell, unabashed. "I really think we ought to christen our work." Mr. Potts puts in dreamily, being in a thirsty mood; and christened it is in champagne. Potts himself, having drunk his own and every one else's health many times, grows gradually gayer and gayer. To wind up this momentous evening without making it remarkable in any way strikes him as being a tame proceeding. "To do or die" suddenly occurs to him, and he instantly acts upon it. Seeing his two former allies standing rather apart from the others, he makes for them and thus addresses them: "Tell you what," he says, with much geniality, "it feels like Christmas, and crackers, and small games, don't it? I feel up to anything. And I have a capital idea in my head. Wouldn't it be rather a joke to frighten the others?" "It would," says Cecil, decidedly. "Would it?" says Molly, diffidently. "I have a first-rate plan; I can make you both look so like ghosts that you would frighten the unsuspecting into fits." "First, Plantagenet, before we go any further into your ghostly schemes, answer me this: _is_ there any gunpowder about it?" "None." Laughing. "You just dress yourselves in white sheets, or that, and hold a plate in your hands filled with whiskey and salt, and--there you are. You have no idea of the tremendous effect. You will be more like a corpse than anything you can imagine." "How cheerful!" murmurs Cecil. "You make me long for the 'sheets and that.'" "Do the whiskey and the salt ever blow up?" asks Molly, cautiously. "Because if so----" "No, they don't; of course not. Say nothing about it to the others, and we shall astonish them by and by. It is an awfully becoming thing, too," says Potts, with a view to encouragement; "you will look like marble statues." "We are trusting you again," says Cecil, regarding him fixedly. "Plantagenet, if you should again be our undoing----" "Not the slightest fear of a _fiasco_ this time," says Potts, comfortably. CHAPTER XXIII. "Here's such a coil! Come, what says Romeo?" --Shakespeare. As eleven o'clock strikes, any one going up the stairs at Herst would have stopped with a mingled feeling of terror and admiration at one particular spot, where, in a niche, upon a pedestal, a very goddess stands.