She, the oldest girl, seized Sybil’s twinkling arm and the trio started at a race for tent and bungalow, leaving that toothless bead-eye, the luminous dory, staring unwinkingly at the tide.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LEADER
“Let your spirit guide us through,
Joan of Arc, they are calling you!”
Over the white sands of the Ipswich Beach, looking towards the long sand-bar, with about three-quarters of a mile of sapphire water sparkling between, the sportive cry rang, with a gay note of challenge under its playfulness:
“Come with the flame in your glance!”
And she came with the flame in her glance--no spirit Maid of Orleans returning to lead the gallant sons of the fleur-de-lys on bleeding fields--as who knows but she may have come to her France in its hardest hour! Not her, but a modern maid with the fire of the morning in her dark eye, a spiritual sense of the wild beauty around her in the quiver of her sensitive lips, with a brine-wet braid of black hair hanging down her back--needing, indeed, only armor and helmet, instead of blue overalls, to make her, as she had been once before in tableaux for the Red Cross, a very fair representation of that Maid of France who, of old, left her sunny orchards to drive the invader from her soil!
“Come with the flame in your glance,
With a garden-rake for a holy lance!”