In the front seats, as usual, there was a picturesque row of Sigma Pi girls, but their ranks were thinned, that night. Five of them were on the platform, saying farewell to Marston High. Louise Markham was one of the five, and, from her seat with the class, she smiled straight down into the adoring eyes of Jacquette Willard who was almost hidden behind the mammoth bunch of pink roses she had brought for Louise, while Aunt Sula, sitting with her white-haired father, watched the loving looks exchanged between the two girls, and thought regretfully how much Jacquette would miss Louise’s companionship in the year that was coming.
Then the piano sounded, and the glee club stood up to sing.
Everything moved like clockwork. Mr. Branch’s remarks were in an unusually happy vein; the glee club outdid itself; Marquis’s address as class president was a gem—“worthy of a college graduate,” his hearers declared—and, last of all, came Robin Sidney Drake, class prophet.
The enthusiasm was uproarious as Bobs took the front of the stage. Everybody there knew what always happened when Marston’s beloved Bobs tried to make a speech, and it seemed as if the haunting fear that his tongue might cleave to the roof of his mouth when he tried to prophesy kept his audience cheering and cheering to put off the evil moment.
But if that was true, the fears were wasted. Bobs had committed the prophecy to memory—and he did not forget.
Perhaps it was because they were surprised at his ability to speak, at all, that his prophecy seemed so good; perhaps it really was a wonderful piece of wit. In either case, he kept his hearers convulsed with merriment from the first word to the last. All over the house, solemn faces broadened into grins; tears rolled down the cheeks of dignified teachers; and it was only by the greatest effort that anyone stopped laughing, after each sally, long enough to let him pronounce the next.
The principal, the teachers, the members of the class, had been told off in the prophecy, until Louise Markham was the only one left. Bobs paused abruptly and glanced in her direction. Then he said to the audience in a confidential tone:
“Wouldst know how future years shall celebrate Miss Markham’s name?
She’ll have to sell that laugh to phonographs;
Its rippling cadences must surely bring her endless fame,