The girls crowded round with suggestions. Toasting biscuits was certainly more entertaining than doing nothing. Deirdre forgot for the time that she was a heroine of fiction, and plumped down by the fender with a lack of high-born dignity that would have scandalized "Lady Isobel".

"You'll smash them up if you try sticking your penknife through them,"

she observed. "It'll burn your fingers too to hold them so close to the fire. Try the tongs."

"Some of them might be tilted up in the fender," volunteered Gerda, whose rare remarks were generally to the point. "They'd be getting hot, and we could finish them off afterwards."

"Right you are! Stick them up in a row. Now if I take this one with the tongs and hold it just over that red piece in the fire----"

"Be careful!"

"Remember it's fragile."

"There, I knew you'd smash it! Oh, pick the other half out, quick! It's burning!"

"What a Johnnie-fingers you are! It's done for."

In the end--and it was Gerda's quiet suggestion--the tongs were placed over the fire like a gridiron and the biscuits successfully popped on the top and turned when one side was done. Everybody appreciated them down to the last crumb, and awarded Betty a vote of thanks for her brilliant idea.

"The worst of it is, they're finished too soon," sighed Evie, "and we've nothing else to fill up the gap till tea-time. I want to do something outrageous--break a window or smash an ornament, or damage the furniture! What a nuisance conscience is! Why does the 'inward monitor'

restrain me?"

"Probably the wholesome dread of consequences my dear. You might cut your hand in a wild orgy of window smashing and there'd be bills to pay afterwards for reglazing and medical attendance."

"But can't we do anything interesting?"

"Let's play a trick on VA," suggested Annie. "It would do them good and shake them up. My conscience gives me full leave."

"It's celebrated for its well-known elasticity!" chuckled Evie.

"But what could we do?"

"Oh, just rag them a little somehow. It would be rather sport."

"Plans for sport in ragtime wanted! All offers carefully considered.

Now, then, bring on your suggestions."

Everybody stared hopefully at everybody else, but no one rose to the occasion.

"Going--going--going--a first-rate opportunity for mirth-provoking----"

"Could we get them into the pa.s.sage and one of us hide behind the curtain of the barred room and act ghost?" proposed Romola desperately.

Her suggestion, however, was received with utter scorn.

"Can't you think of anything more original than that?"

"We're fed up with that ghost trick. n.o.body even calls it funny now."

"Besides, Miss Birks said she'd punish anyone who did it again. She was awfully angry last time."

Duly squashed, Romola subsided, and the silence which followed resembled that of a Quakers' meeting.

"I've got it!" shouted Betty at last, clapping her hands ecstatically.

"The very thing! Oh, the supremest joke!"

"Good biz! But please condescend to explain," commented Evie.

"Oh, we'll try thing-um-bob--what d'you call it? Mesmerism--that's the word I want. With dinner plates, you know."

Apparently n.o.body knew, for all looked interested and intelligent, but unenlightened.

"Do you mean to say you've never heard of it? Oh, goody! What luck!"

"Look here," interposed Annie, "you're not going to rag us as well. It's to be for the benefit of VA if there's any sell about it."

"All right! They'll really be enough, and you shall act audience. Only with fourteen of you it would have been so----"

"Betty Scott, give us your word this instant that you won't play tricks on your own Form."

"I won't--I won't--honest, I won't!"

"And tell us what you're going to do."

"No, that would spoil it all. You must wait and see. Barbara, go to the kitchen door and cajole Cook into lending us seven dinner plates. Say you'll pledge your honour not to break them. And purloin a candle from the lamp cupboard. Be as quick as you can! Time wanes."

Barbara executed her errand with speed and success. She soon returned with the plates and set them down on the table. Betty lighted the candle, laid one plate aside, then held each of the others in turn over the flame till the bottoms inside the rims were well coloured with smoke. The girls watched her curiously.

"Now, I'm ready!" she announced, "but I want a messenger. Elyned, you go and tap at VA door and say we shall be very pleased if they care to come and try a most interesting experiment. Mind you put it politely, and for your life don't sn.i.g.g.e.r."

Now VA had been spending an even duller and more wearisome afternoon than VB, for they had not had the diversion of toasting biscuits. They were yawning in the last stages of boredom when Elyned arrived and delivered her message. Usually they considered themselves far too select to have much to do with the lower division, but to-day anything to break the monotony was welcome. They accepted the invitation with alacrity, and came trooping in to the rival cla.s.sroom with pleased antic.i.p.ation in their faces.

"It's a most curious experiment," began Betty. "I learnt it from a cousin who's been out East. He saw it practised by some Chinese priests at a josshouse. I believe it's one of the first steps of initiation in Esoteric Buddhism. My cousin's not exactly a Theosophist, but he's interested in comparative theologies, and he went about with a lama, and found out ever so many of their secrets. He wrote down the formulary of this for me."

"What's it about?" asked the elder girls, looking considerably impressed.

"It's a species of mesmerism--or animal magnetism, as some people prefer to call it. You make certain pa.s.ses, and repeat certain words after me, and then you all get into the hypnotic state. Of course it depends how psychic you are, but anybody with even undeveloped mediumistic powers will sometimes give replies to questions they couldn't possibly answer in the normal state."

"I suppose it won't hurt us?" asked Agnes Gillard rather gravely.

"Oh, not at all! It's wonderful sometimes to find how people who've never even suspected they possessed psychic gifts bring out absolutely unaccountable pieces of information. It really would be quite uncanny, except for the latest theory that it's merely utilizing a natural power once cultivated by man, but long forgotten except by a few priests in the Tibetan monasteries. The Theosophical Society, of course, is trying to revive it."

"I'm afraid I don't know anything about Theosophy," murmured Hilda Marriott.

"It's akin to the Eleusinian mysteries and the cult of Isis," continued Betty unblushingly. "You have to understand 'Karma' (that's reincarnation) and 'Yoga' (that's flitting about in your astral body while you're asleep), and--and--" But here both memory and invention failed her, so she hurriedly changed her point. "Oh! it would take me years to explain, and you couldn't understand unless you'd been initiated. Let's get to the experiment. Will you all stand in a row?"

"Aren't any of you going to try?" asked Irene Jordan, addressing the members of VB, who, solemn as judges, stood slightly in the background.

"We can only do it with seven, the mystic number--and there are eight of them, and they can't agree who's to be left out," said Betty hurriedly.