nt eyes never left my face.
Afterward she came back to the dressing-room where we stood, with
our diplomas in our hands, walked up to me, and said heartily: 'You
surprised me, Jim. I didn't believe you could do as well as that. You
didn't get that speech out of books.' Among my graduation presents there
was a silk umbrella from Mrs. Harling, with my name on the handle.

I walked home from the Opera House alone. As I passed the Methodist
Church, I saw three white figures ahead of me, pacing up and down under
the arching maple trees, where the moonlight filtered through the lush
June foliage. They hurried toward me; they were waiting for me--Lena and
Tony and Anna Hansen.

'Oh, Jim, it was splendid!' Tony was breathing hard, as she always did
when her feelings outran her language. 'There ain't a lawyer in Black
Hawk could make a speech like that. I just stopped your grandpa and
said so to him. He won't tell you, but he told us he was awful surprised
himself, didn't he, girls?'

Lena sidled up to me and said teasingly, 'What made you so solemn? I
thought you were scared. I was sure you'd forget.'

Anna spoke wistfully.

'It must make you very happy, Jim, to have fine thoughts like that
in your mind all the time, and to have words to put them in. I always
wanted to go to school, you know.'

'Oh, I just sat there and wished my papa could hear you! Jim'--Antonia
took hold of my coat lapels--'there was something in your speech that
made me think so about my papa!'

'I thought about your papa when I wrote my speech, Tony,' I said. 'I
dedicated it to him.'

She threw her arms around me, and her dear face was all wet with tears.

I stood watching their white dresses glimmer smaller and smaller down
the sidewalk as they went away. I have had no other success that pulled
at my heartstrings like that one.

XIV

THE DAY AFTER COMMENCEMENT I moved my books and desk upstairs, to an
empty room where I should be undisturbed, and I fell to studying in
earnest. I worked off a year's trigonometry that summer, and began
Virgil alone. Morning after morning I used to pace up and down my sunny
little room, looking off at the distant river bluffs and the roll of the
blond pastures between, scanning the 'Aeneid' aloud and committing long
passages to memory. Sometimes in the evening Mrs. Harling called to me
as I passed her gate, and asked me to come in and let her play for me.
She was lonely for Charley, she said, and liked to