As April went by, we Seniors got busy with the first awful preliminaries
of Commencement. It began to be considered around college that Senior
Day would settle the affair one way or the other. Senior Day is the last
event of Commencement Week at Siwash and more engagements have been
announced formally or otherwise that day than at any other time. If a
Senior man and girl, who had been making a rather close study of each
other, walked out on the campus together after the exercises and took in
the corporation dinner at noon side by side, no one hesitated about
offering congratulations. They might not be exactly due, but it was a
sign that there was going to be an awful lot of nice-looking stationery
spoiled by the two after the sad partings were said. Now we didn't have
a doubt that either Frankling or Ole would amble proudly down between
the lilac rows on Class Day with Miss Spencer, under the good old
pretense of helping her locate the dinner-tables a hundred yards away;
and betting on the affair got pretty energetic. Day after day the odds
varied. When Frankling broke closing-time rules at Browning Hall by a
good thirty minutes some two-to-one money was placed on him. When Ole
and Miss Spencer cut chapel the next day the odds promptly switched. You
could get takers on either side at any time, but I think the odds
favored Ole a little. You can't help boosting your preferences with
your good money. It's like betting on your college team.
Commencement Week came and, although we were Seniors, we went through it
without hardly noticing the scenery. We watched Ole and Frankling all
through Baccalaureate, and when Ole won a twenty-yard dash across the
church and over several of us, and marched down the street with Miss
Spencer, it looked as if all was over but the Mendelssohn business. But
Frankling had her in a box at the class play the next night. How could
you pay any attention to the glorious threshold of life and the expiring
gasps of dear college days with a race like that on!
Commencement was on Wednesday and Senior Day was Thursday. Up to
Wednesday night it was an even break--steen points all. One of the two
had won. We hadn't a doubt of it. But, if both men had been born poker
players, drawing to fill, in a jack-pot that had been sweetened nine
times, you couldn't have told less to look at them. Frankling was as
glum as ever and Ole had the same reënforced concrete expression of
innocence that he used to wear while he was getting off the ball behind
somebody's goal line, after having carried it the length of the field.
We were discussing the thing that night on the porch of the Eta Bita Pie
house and were putting up a few final bets when Ole came up, carpet-bag
in hand and his diploma under his arm, and bade us good-by. He was going
out on the midnight train--going away for good.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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