In to-night’s exercises every former custom had been religiously kept and religiously exaggerated to the last possible degree. In the annals of the town, such a distinguished class never before had been graduated. This class embodied the son of the banker, the handsome, carefree boy concerning whom every one prophesied evil, whose escapades were laughed at and glossed over as they would have been in the case of no other boy in the community. Men who should have known better, rather evinced pride when Junior Moreland stopped to say a few words to them. It was the common talk of the town that the Senior Moreland lay awake nights thinking up ways to indulge, to pamper, his only son. The influence of Junior’s good looks and his brazen assurance was so pronounced that the whole town combined in helping to spoil him. Where he should have had a reprimand, where any other boy would have had it, Junior usually evoked a laugh. So he had grown to feel that he was a law unto himself; that he might do things which the other boys might not; that he was a natural leader upon any occasion on which he chose to lead. This night’s class embraced Edith Williams, grown thus far to womanhood with most of the ills and the discontent of her childhood clinging to her. It was very probable that Edith’s first conscious thought was that she had been defrauded. Why didn’t God make her with a strong, beautiful body? Why didn’t He give her voice the power of song, her fingers facility for the harp or the piano that she could buy if she chose? Why did He take both her parents and leave her to live with an uncle whom she never could endure, and with an aunt, sycophant to such a degree, that the child shrewdly suspected, from a very early age, that the otherwise estimable lady was hoping that she would die and leave “all that money” to her only heir, who happened to be the husband of the lady in question. Edith had heard about “all that money” ever since she had been born. She had come to understand that it could buy her the most expensive clothing worn in the town. It could buy her entrance into any gaiety taking place in any home. It could buy the most expensive house in Ashwater and any furnishings her taste might dictate. It could, in fact, buy everything to which she had been accustomed all her life, but it could not buy her the two things which she craved almost above life itself—beauty and happiness. No one could convince her that at least a moderate degree of beauty lay within her own power. She had only contempt for a woman like Elizabeth Spellman, who tried to tell her that keeping irregular hours, practically living on cake and candy, that the wearing of stays which reduced her slender proportions to pipe-stem slenderness, were responsible for the things in life against which Edith most strongly rebelled. In vain Mrs. Spellman tried to point out that regular sleep, regular bathing, a diet consisting largely of fruits and