"It is after luncheon now, and she has gone to her room to rest awhile. So have the other girls. But I couldn't sleep. The days are slipping by too fast for me to waste any time that way."
The house was quiet when Mary closed her journal. Joyce was still asleep on the bed, and through the open door she could see Betty, tilted back in a big chair, nodding over a magazine. She concluded it would be a good time to dash off a letter to Holland, but with a foresight which prompted her to be ready for any occasion, she decided to dress first for the evening. Tiptoeing around the room, she brushed her hair in the new way Mom Beck had taught her, and, taking out her prettiest white dress, proceeded to array herself in honor of the best man's coming. Then she rummaged in the tray of her trunk till she found her pink coral necklace and fan-chain, and, with a sigh of satisfaction that she was ready for any emergency, seated herself at her letter-writing.
She had written only a page, however, when the clock on the stairs chimed four. The deep tones echoing through the hall sent Lloyd bouncing up from her couch, her hair falling over her shoulders and her long kimono tripping her at every step, as she ran into Joyce's room.
"What are we going to do?" she cried in dismay. "I ovahslept myself, and now it's foah o'clock, and Phil's train due in nine minutes. The carriage is at the doah and none of us dressed to go to meet him. I wrote that the entiah bridal party would be there."
Joyce sprang up in a dazed sort of way, and began putting on her slippers. The bridesmaids had talked so much about the grand welcome the best man was to receive on his entrance to the Valley that, half-awake as she was, she could not realize that it was too late to carry out their plans.
"Oh, it's no use trying to get ready now," said Lloyd, in a disappointed tone. "We couldn't dress and get to the station in time to save ou' lives." Then her glance fell on Mary, sitting at her desk in all her brave array of pink ribbons and corals.
"Why, Mary can go!" she cried, in a relieved tone. "I had forgotten that she knows Phil as well as we do. Run on, that's a deah! Don't stop for a hat! You won't need it in the carriage. Tell him that you're the maid of honah on this occasion!"
It was all over so quickly, the rapid drive down the avenue, the quick dash up to the station as the train came puffing past, that Mary had little time to rehearse the part she had been bidden to play. She was so afraid that Phil would not recognize her that she wondered if she ought not to begin by introducing herself. She pictured the scene in her mind as they rolled along, unconscious that she was smiling and bowing into empty air, as she rehearsed the speech with which she intended to impress him. She would be as dignified and gracious as the Princess herself; not at all like the hoydenish child of eleven who had waved her sunbonnet at him in parting three years before.
The sight of the train as it slowed up sent a queer inward quiver of expectancy through her, and her cheeks were flushed with eagerness as she leaned forward watching for him. With a nervous gesture, she put her hand up to her hair-ribbons to make sure that her bows were in place, and then clutched the coral necklace. Then Betty's sermon flashed across her mind, and the thought that she had done just like the self-conscious girl at school brought a distressed pucker between her eyebrows. But the next instant she forgot all about it. She forgot the princess-like way in which she was to step from the carriage, the dignity with which she was to offer Phil her hand, and the words wherewith she was to welcome him. She had caught sight of a wide-brimmed gray hat over the heads of the crowd, and a face, bronzed and handsome, almost as dear in its familiar outlines as Jack's or Holland's. Her carefully rehearsed actions flew to the winds, as, regardless of the strangers all about, she sprang from the carriage and ran along bareheaded in the sun. And Phil, glancing around him for the bridal party that was to meet him, was surprised beyond measure when this little apparition from the Arizona Wigwam caught him by the hand.
"Bless my soul, it's the little Vicar!" he exclaimed. "Why, it's like getting back home to see you! And how you've grown, and how really civilized you are!"