“Say, but she’s a corker!”
Now she was running beside Napoleon. Suddenly she grasped his reins, and stopped him just as he was nearing the road, and thinking without doubt that he would escape to his Hillcrest stable where pageantry was unknown. She straightened his bedraggled robes as well as she could, then with one hand on his neck, sprang to his back with as much ease as though he had been a Shetland pony, and, amid the cheers of the audience, rode back to receive the homage, not only of the Dauphin, but of the gathering at large.
The pageant proceeded. Queen Elizabeth, borne by her eight retainers, was received by a somewhat trembling Earl of Leicester, who did not seem at all sure of his steed; Mary Stuart was dignity and courage itself as she marched to the scaffold, led by two perfectly serious headsmen; and Martin Luther eclipsed even his rehearsal of the morning. But none like the second Joan was prompted by necessity to forget the bonds of History, and establish a new tradition to add to the hundreds already clustering about St. Helen’s.
“For,” said the white-haired bishop, shaking hands with her, as she stood in her page’s costume of doublet and hose, surrounded by an admiring group, “St. Helen’s girls will never forget this Joan, though their memory may be hazy as to her of Domremy; just as they’ll always remember St. Helen’s champion chimney-sweep, and probably forget all about Charles Kingsley’s. Isn’t that so, my dear?” And he turned with a quizzical smile toward the Blackmore twin, who had dropped into the grate before his astonished eyes the year before.
“Well,” said Carver Standish III, as bearing Joan’s spear and shield, he accompanied her across the campus, “well, all I’ve got to say is, Miss Hunter, you surely are a winner! And I’m some glad grandfather brought me over to meet you!”
“I’m glad, too,” answered the happy Joan, “but I’m not Miss Hunter, I’m just Virginia. You see I’m especially anxious not to be a young lady when I get back home.”
CHAPTER XX—THE VIGILANTES’ LAST MEETING
“It’s absolutely unbelievable!” cried Priscilla.
“It’s a fairy-tale!” said Vivian.
“I’ll just count the minutes till August!” declared Virginia.