home, or down to the University, and he--to the troopship, and the
high seas, and after that no telling. The strap of his knapsack hurt
him. They said that Manila was a furnace. He wished that the women would
stop loading them with flowers; he wished that Pellams and the other
fellows wouldn't keep running out to march beside him; didn't they know
how hard he was trying to hold it back? And what did this going amount
to, anyway? If he had staid out, there would have been only one gap in
the company. Then, in a rest, Pellams got to his side with a bottle of
ice-cold Pilsener and Tom pointed its base to the sky and gained
courage.

There was a falling apart to his right, and he felt rather than saw that
his mother had slipped through the crowd and taken his hand in her slim,
white one, was marching beside him over the cruel cobble-stones;
Pellams, too, closed up on the other side, for the officers were not
trying to keep the alignment as they drew near the end. These three went
on together, she trying to be brave now that the last had come, Pellams
clumping along over the rough pavement and joking in ecstatic disregard
of the discomfort of his fat body. It was over at last, the mounted
police were pushing back the crowd; it was to be all alone now. The
Stanford men gave their yell together, the volunteer held his mother
close for a moment. Then,--"Company, attention!"--the dock faded into
mist, so that he stumbled on the gangway.

Not until that night, when a group of them paced along the wharf, had
anyone spoken of Class Day. Cap Smith had started it.

"They are going to the Ball now," said he.

"I wonder if Lyman came out ahead on the Show," said Marion, his eye on
the dollar, even at that solemn moment.

"I wonder if the programs got down in time," said Tom, and then he
laughed to think of himself, the chairman of the Ball committee,
plodding along the splintered dock in a dusty uniform and buff leggings
and with the rudiments of a scraggly beard on his face. It was a queer
ending.

Down there, the others were floating round, now, to high-priced music
from town. In a little note which Pellams had brought him from Her that
morning, she had said that she was to wear a small silk flag instead of
flowers this time. He would have liked to peep in, as he used to from
the gym roof when he was a Freshie, to see if she had really done it.

During these wharf-edge musings, taps had blown, bringing the men on
board again.