ng.

"Am _I_ all right, mother?" begged Isobel, pirouetting in her fluffy
white.

Uncle Johnny rushed in. He was very dapper in a new tailcoat and a
flower in _his_ buttonhole. He was very nervous, too, for he was to give
the address of the day. He pulled a small box from his pocket.

"A little graduating gift for my Bonnie." It was a circlet pin
of sapphires. He fastened it against the soft, white folds of
her dress. "You know what a ring is symbolic of, Isobel? Things
eternal--everlasting--never ending. That's like my faith in you." He
lifted the pretty, flushed, happy face and kissed it. "Come on,
now--everybody ready?"

If they had not all been so excited over the Commencement they must have
noticed that there was something very different in Uncle Johnny's
manner--a certain breathless exaltation such as one feels when one has
girded one's self for a great deed.

He _had_ made up his mind to something. The day before, while he had
been preparing the Commencement address, all kinds of thoughts had
haunted him--thoughts concerning Barbara Lee. That half-hour with her in
her little office, when she had told him she was going away, had opened
his eyes. He had cried out: "What will we do without you?" He had really
meant, "What will _I_ do without you?"

Absurd--he tried to reason the whole thing calmly--absurd that this slip
of a girl, who knew _Chinese_, had become necessary to his happiness!
How in thunder had it happened? But there is no answer to that--and he
was in no state of mind to reason; she was going away--and he could not
_let_ her go away.

So all the while he was dashing off splendid things about loyalty (John
Westley had won several oratorical contests at college) his brain was
asking humbly, "Will she laugh at an old bachelor like me--if I tell
her?" He had hated the face he saw in the mirror, edged above his ears
with closely-clipped gray hair. Thirty-six years old; he had not thought
that so very old until now; contrasted with Barbara Lee's splendid youth
it seemed like ninety.

"I'll tell her--just the same," was his final determination; she was on
her way to the "stars," but he wanted her to know that he loved her with
a strength and constancy the greater for his thirty-six years.

From the platform he stared out over the sea of serious young faces--and
saw only the one. He stood before them all, speaking with an earnestness
and a beauty of thought that was inspired--not by the detached gro