"Good-by, Cynthia dear," he whispered. Her hands fluttered helplessly about his coat lapels and then fell to her side. She managed a brave little smile. "Good-by--honey." Carl rushed up with the bag. "Gosh, Hugh, you've got to hurry; they're closing the gate." He gripped his hand for a second. "Visit me at Bar Harbor this summer if you can." "Sure. Good-by, old man. Good-by Cynthia." "Good-by--good-by." Hugh slipped through the gate and, turned to wave at Carl and Cynthia. They waved back, and then he ran for the train. On the long trip to Haydensville Hugh relaxed. Now that the strain was over, he felt suddenly weak, but it was sweet weakness. He could graduate in peace now. The visit to New York had been worth while. And what do you know, bumping into old Carl like that I Cynthia and he were friends, too, the best friends in the world, but she no longer wanted to marry him. That was fine.... He remembered the picture she and Carl had made standing on the other side of the gate from him. "What a peach of a pair. Golly, wouldn't it be funny if they hit it off...." He thought over every word that he and Cynthia had said. She certainly had been square all right. Not many like her, but "by heaven, I knew down in my heart all the time that I didn't want to get married or even engaged. It would have played hell with everything." CHAPTER XXVII The next morning Hugh's mother and father arrived in the automobile. He was to drive them back to Merrytown the day after commencement. At last he stood in the doorway of the Nu Delta house and welcomed his father, but he had forgotten all about that youthful dream. He was merely aware that he was enormously glad to see the "folks" and that his father seemed to be withering into an old man. As the under-classmen departed, the alumni began to arrive. The "five year" classes dressed in extraordinary outfits--Indians, Turks, and men in prison garb roamed the campus. There were youngsters just a year out of college, still looking like undergraduates, still full of college talk. The alumni ranged all the way from these one-year men to the fifty-year men, twelve old men who had come back to Sanford fifty years after their graduation, and two of them had come all the way across the continent. There had been only fifty men originally in that class; and twelve of them were back. What brought them back? Hugh wondered. He thought he knew, but he couldn't have given a reason. He watched those old men wandering slowly around the campus, one of them with his grandson who was graduating this year, and he was awed by their age and their devotion to their alma mater. Yes, Henley had been right. Sanford was far from perfect, far from it--a child could see that--but there was something in the college that gripped one's heart. What faults that old college had; but how one loved her!