The great day came at last and found
the girls in a fever of mingled excitement and fear.
Excitement because of the great advent; fear, because
the sky had been overcast since early morning and it
looked as if the whole thing might have to be postponed
on account of rain.
“And if there is anything I
hate,” complained Laura, moving restlessly from
her mirror over to the window and back again, “it’s
to be all prepared for a thing and then have it spoiled
at the last minute by rain.”
“Well, I guess you don’t
hate it any more than the rest of us,” said
Billie, her thoughts on the pretty pink flowered dress
she had decided to wear to the parade. It was
not only a pretty dress, but was very becoming.
Both Teddy and Chet had told her so. “And
the boys would be terribly disappointed,” she
added.
“I wonder,” Vi was sitting
on the bed, sewing a hook and eye on the dress she
had intended to wear, “if Amanda Peabody and
The Shadow will be there.”
Laura turned abruptly from the window
and regarded her with a reproachful stare.
“Now I know you’re a joy
killer,” she said; “for if Amanda Peabody
and The Shadow (the name the girls had given Eliza
Dilks because she always followed Amanda as closely
as a shadow does) succeeded in getting themselves
invited to any sort of affair where we girls were to
be, they would be sure to do something annoying.”
“They are going to be there,
just the same,” said Billie, and the two girls
looked at her in surprise. “They told me
so,” she said, in answer to the unspoken question.
“They have some sort of relatives among the
boys at the Academy, and these relatives didn’t
have sense enough not to invite them.”
“Humph!” grunted Laura,
“Amanda probably hinted around till the boys
couldn’t help inviting her. Look-oh,
look!” she cried in such a different tone that
the girls stared at her. “The sun!”
she said. “Oh, it’s going to clear
up, it’s going to clear up!”
“Well, you needn’t step
on my blue silk for all that,” complained Vi,
as Laura caught an exultant heel in the latter’s
dress.
“Don’t be grouchy, darling,”
said Laura, all good-nature again now that the sun
had appeared. “My, but we’re going
to have a good time!”
“I’ll say we are,”
sang out Billie, as she gayly spread out the pink
flowered dress upon the bed. “And we’re
not going to let anybody spoil it either-even
Eliza Dilks and Amanda Peabody.”
The girls had an hour in which to
get ready, and they were ready and waiting before
half that time was up. The Three Towers Hall carryall
was to call for the girls who had been lucky enough
to receive invitations from the cadets of Boxton Military
Academy, and as the girls, looking like gay-colored
butterflies in their summery dresses, gathered on the
steps of the school there were so many of them that
it began to look as if the carryall would have to
make two trips.
“If we have to go in sections
I wonder whether we’ll be in the first or second,”
Vi was saying when Billie grasped her arm.
“Look,” she cried, merriment
in her eyes and in her voice. “Here come
Amanda and Eliza. Did you ever see anything so
funny-and awful-in your life?”
For Amanda and her chum were dressed
in their Sunday best-poplin dresses with
a huge, gorgeous flower design that made the pretty,
delicate-colored dresses of the other girls look pale
and washed-out by comparison. If Amanda’s
and Eliza’s desire was to be the most noticeable
and talked-of girls on the parade, they were certainly
going to succeed. The talk had begun already!
However, the arrival of the carryall
cut short the girls’ amusement, and there was
great excitement and noise and giggling as the girls-all
who could get in, that is-clambered in.
There were about a dozen left over,
and these the driver promised to come back and pick
up “in a jiffy.”
“I’m feeling awfully nervous,”
Laura confided to Billie. “I never expected
to be nervous; did you?”
“Yes, I did,” Billie answered
truthfully. “I’ve been nervous ever
since the boys invited us. It’s because
it’s all so new, I guess. We’ve never
been to anything like this before.”
“I’m frightened to death
when I think of meeting Captain Shelling,” Connie
leaned across Vi to say. “From what the
boys say about him he must be simply wonderful.”
“Paul had better look out,”
said Laura slyly, and Connie drew back sharply.
“I think you’re mean to
tease Connie so,” spoke up Vi. “She
doesn’t like Paul Martinson any better than
the rest of us do, and you know it.”
“Oh, I do, do I -”
began Laura, but Billie broke in hastily.
“Girls,” she cried, “stop
your quarreling. Look! We’re at the
Academy. And-look-look -”
Words failed her, and she just stared wonderingly at
the sight that met her eyes. It was true, none
of them had ever seen anything like it before.
Booths of all sorts and colors were
distributed over the parade ground, leaving free only
the part where the cadets were to march. Girls
in bright-colored dresses and boys in trim uniforms
were already walking about making brilliant patches
of color against the green of the parade ground.
There were some older people, too,
fathers and mothers of the boys, but the groups were
mostly made up of young people, gay and excited with
the exhilaration of the moment.
There were girls and matrons in the
costume of French peasants wandering in and out among
the visitors, carrying little baskets filled with
ribbon-tied packages. Some of these packages contained
candy, some just little foolish things to make the
young folks laugh, favors to take away with them and
remember the day by.
As the carryall stopped and one after
another the girls jumped to the ground they were surprised
to find that their nervousness, instead of growing
less, was getting worse and worse all the time.
They were standing on the edge of
things, wondering just what to do next and wishing
some one would meet them when some one did just that
very thing.
Paul Martinson spied the carryall
from Three Towers Hall, called to a couple of his
friends, and came running down toward the girls, his
handsome face alight with pleasure.
“Hello!” he said.
“We thought you were never coming. Say,
you make all the other girls look like nothing at
all.” He was supposed to be talking to
them all, but he was looking straight at Billie.
But although the other girls noticed
it, Billie did not. She was looking beyond Paul
to where three boys, Teddy in the lead, were bearing
down upon them.
After that the boys soon made their
guests feel as if they had never been nervous in their
lives, and they entered into the fun with all their
hearts.
The parade of cadets was the most
wonderful part of it all, of course, and the girls
stood through it, their hearts beating wildly, a delicious
wave of patriotism thrilling to their finger tips.
And when it was over the girls looked at Teddy and
Chet and Ferd and Paul with a new respect that the
boys liked but did not understand at all.
Several times during the afternoon
they came across Eliza and Amanda and their escorts-who
did not look like bad boys at all. But only once
did the girls try to shove to the front.
It was when Teddy and Paul had taken
Billie and Connie over to the ice cream booth for
refreshments, the other boys and girls having wandered
off somewhere by themselves.
Billie was standing up near the counter
when Eliza Dilks deliberately elbowed her way in ahead
of her.
Billie began to feel herself getting
angry, but before she could say anything, Teddy spoke
over her shoulder.
“Please serve us next,”
he said to the pleasant-faced matron who had charge
of this part of the refreshments. “Some
of these others just came in and belong at the end
of the line.”
“Yes, I noticed you were here
first,” the woman answered, and handed Billie
her ice cream over Eliza’s head while Eliza,
with a glance at Billie that should have killed her
on the spot, turned sullenly and walked away.
“Teddy, you’re a wonder,”
murmured Billie under her breath. “I couldn’t
have done it like that myself.”
After this encounter Billie and her
party wandered over to the dancing pavilion on the
outside of which they met Laura and Vi and their escorts
for the afternoon.
“Isn’t this the dandiest
band in the world?” sighed Billie in supreme
content. “Such music would make-would
make even Amanda Peabody dance well.”
“Oh, come, Billie, that’s
too much!” laughed Teddy, swinging her on to
the floor and giving her what she called a heavenly
dance.
And indeed what could have been better
fun than this dance on a smooth floor so large that
it did not seem crowded, to the best of music, with
a partner who was a perfect dancer, and-though
Billie did not say this to herself-by a
girl who was herself as light and graceful a dancer
as was on the floor?
All things must end, even the most
perfect day in a lifetime, as Vi called it, and finally
the girls had been tucked into the carryall and were
once more back at Three Towers Hall, ready, with a
new day, to take up the routine of school life once
more.