“There’s the creek bridge!” cried Priscilla, springing to her feet a few minutes later. “Virginia has written me a dozen times that when we crossed that red bridge we should begin to get ready. I suppose I ought to comb my hair. It’s a sight! But Virginia’ll be so happy she’ll never notice in all this world!”
Virginia was assuredly too happy to notice disheveled heads or smoke-stained faces or wrinkled suits when she saw her own dear Aunt Nan and her very best friends step excitedly from the train onto the little station platform. That queer sinking feeling inside vanished, and only joy was left.
“It’s come true! It’s come true!” she kept crying as she greeted them all. “Just think, Priscilla, it’s really happening this minute! You’re all in my country at last—Donald’s and mine!”
So the world looked very beautiful to them all as they drove homeward. The three boys on the front seat became acquainted and re-acquainted, while the Vigilantes and Aunt Nan behind held one another’s 21 hands and asked question after question of the happy Virginia. No, she told them, the days weren’t all as perfect, but most of them were. Yes, the sunflowers grew wild all in among the grain. No, there were no snakes very near. Yes, it was truly sixty-five miles away to the farthest mountains. No, she had never been so happy in all her life.
They stopped at the Keith ranch to receive a copyrighted Western welcome, and to leave Jack and Carver. Donald would drive the girls home, and then return. Mr. David, Mother Mary, Malcolm and little Kenneth—all the Keith family—came to greet them. It seemed to Jack Williams as though he had never received a welcome so genuine; and to the hungry and tired Carver Standish III the simple brown ranch-house, surrounded by cottonwoods and set about by wide grain-fields, possessed a charm unsurpassed by the most stately mansions of New England.
The Vigilantes and Aunt Nan received as genuine a welcome a half hour later when they drove down the long avenue of cottonwoods to Virginia’s home. It came not only from a tall, bronzed man, who 22 shared his little daughter’s joy, but also from a white-aproned, kind-faced woman in the doorway, and a quiet, stooped man by Aunt Nan’s marigolds.
“I know it’s Hannah,” cried Priscilla, running to the doorway. “She looks just as though she knew all about the German measles!”
“And I’m sure this is William,” said Mary a little shyly, as she shook hands with the quiet man by the garden. “It just couldn’t be—any one else!”