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.