Commencement; and her mother cried and her father watched with eyes blurred when Alice walked up in her turn to take her diploma and when the class and the other students clapped and clapped for her as they did for nobody else.
Alice hardly thought of what she was doing; she thought: "David's here with me for the last time." The epoch of their perforced meetings was finished. She thought: "Only by accident will I ever see him again. He'll marry Fidelia soon. He's waiting until after the twenty-second." For Alice knew David so well that she realized how he was feeling about that date of the twenty-second.
David saw Fidelia off on the train with Dorothy and her mother and father. They departed in the morning after Commencement; and it seemed to David, on that morning, that Fidelia purposely avoided letting him find her alone.
He made her promise, again, to wait for him to call for her at Streator; but, after she was gone, he worried.
He had torn up, after one reading, the letter which his father had sent him; but he kept his mother's flowers until after they faded and then he preserved one white petalled daisy, pressing it between the leaves of the bible his mother had given him.
Two days after the twenty-second, the Hamilton factory happened to make delivery of several car-loads of automobiles which David sent at once to the customers who had ordered; and so he had earned and had in hand considerable money of his own. He wired Fidelia that he was coming for her; that night he was
