It was mid-June before the night of Commencement arrived. The Methodist Church, being the largest suitable edifice of the town, was used for the imposing occasion. The lower grades of the high school and friends of the graduates, as well as the alumni of preceding years, had all combined in decorating the building for the Commencement exercises. The big swinging chandeliers hanging from the ceiling were wreathed in greenery accentuated with flowers. The edge of the pulpit platform was outlined with gaily blooming plants. The space intervening between that and the altar railing was filled with showy plants in tubs and buckets, one end finishing with a white oleander in a mass of snowy bloom, the other exactly like it except that the flowers were peach-blow pink. The pulpit had been removed. Back of the chairs for the graduating class there was a second row for the principal, the teachers of the schools, the School Board, and several ministers, and lining the wall, a small forest of gay leaves and bright flowers. Every window was filled with the lovely roses of June, with flowering almond, japonica, iris, and gay streamers of striped grass.

It was the custom to hold the graduating exercises in the church, then to repair to Newberry’s Hotel for a supper which was the last word in culinary effort on the part of the owners, helped out by table decorations provided by the alumni and the lower classes of the high school. The long tables for the graduates and their parents, for the singers and speakers, were lovely. They were laid with linen that was truly snowy, with silver provided by several of the wealthiest families of the town, with china that came from the same cabinets as the silver; and these tables were made beautiful beyond words with great bowls of yellow, white, and purple wild violets, starry campion, anemones, maidenhair fern, and every exquisite wilding that knew June in the Central States.

After the banquet, the class and its guests took up the line of march across the street and in the upstairs of the big building known as Franklin’s Opera House, they danced until morning. Commencement was the one great social affair known to Ashwater. Nothing else in the history of the town called forth such an audience. It was the one occasion upon which the church people forgot that the lure of the dance would imperil the souls of their young. They went and drank lemonade and fanned themselves as they sat in double rows of chairs lining the walls, many of them joining the dance to the mellow notes of a harp brought all the way from Indianapolis.

Never was a gathering more cosmopolitan. The invited guests were relatives and friends of the graduates. So it happened that the august person of Martin Moreland, the banker, might come in very close contact with that of Jimmy Price, general handy-man, in such case as to-night when one of Jimmy’s lean daughters was a graduate. For once in his life Jimmy might don his wedding suit, accompanied by any remnants of dignity that forty years of playing the clown had left in his mental cosmos, and making an effort to be grave and correct, he might have this one peep at what the truly great of his town did when they entertained themselves.

June in the Central States is a hot month; mid-June the crucial time. The thermometer is likely, at that period, to hover persistently at anywhere from ninety-five to a hundred and ten. The dew of night closely following such a degree of heat was sure to breed a moist stickiness that washed the pink powder from the noses of the august, and in slow streams of discouragement, saw to it that artificially waved hair degenerated into little winding rivers of despair. It was very likely to emphasize mothy complexions and deeply cut wrinkles by washing into their cruel lines white or vivid pink powder, leaving high promontories lacking decoration in ghastly contrast. To appear cool and fresh and charming upon such a night, was the height of triumph. It was the thing that few people even remotely hoped to do. The men frankly mopped their streaming faces and the backs of their necks. They tried to look cheerful if they found that their high linen collars were even half way upstanding; mostly these were protected by a tucked-in handkerchief until the doors were reached. They were often seen wiping their hands and their wrists with these same moist handkerchiefs, and the ladies, in their billowing skirts containing yards upon yards of heavy goods, in their tightly fitting sleeves and waists, religiously wearing headgear, which they would have thought it absolutely indecent to remove, dabbled frantically at their complexions, the corners of their mouths sagged in despair as they felt the hair slowly drooping over their foreheads, while they fanned frantically in an effort to keep sufficiently cool to save their silk dresses.

It was the custom for the omnibus from Newberry’s Hotel to drive to the residences gathering up the graduates and depositing them at the side door leading into the prayer-meeting room of the church, slightly before the time the organist began to play the entrance march.

Usually the four walls of the church heard nothing gayer than “Onward Christian Soldiers” or “Marching to Zion,” but it was conceded to the youth of the city that on Commencement night the organist might tackle what was spoken of, in rather awed tones, as “sheet music.” It was customary to hire, for these occasions, a graduate from the Fort Wayne Conservatory to sing several solos. This marked a high light in the exercises. These graduates from a musical school might do the daring thing of coming clothed in billowing silks of peach-blow pink. In one instance, the crowd had lost its breath over such a dress glaringly trimmed in blood-red. This, in conjunction with a bared breast and arms, a becurled head as yellow as the cowslips down by the Ashwater river, had been almost too much for the morality of the audience. The young lady had saved the situation by a sobbingly pathetic rendition of “When the Flowing Tide Comes In.” When she had her audience audibly weeping over the “ships that came in clouds like flocks of evil birds,” and then led them on to the salt-saturated ending of “remembering Donald’s words,” the weeping crowd so thoroughly enjoyed the performance that they forgave what they considered the extreme bad taste of the blood-decorated pink dress.

In gathering the graduates, it might have been instinct on the part of the driver, and it might have been suggestion on the part of authority, at any rate, it was customary to bring in the poor and the unimportant and give them this one ride of their lives in state, usually down Hill Street, past the bank, the main business buildings, and the Court House, ending at the side steps of the Methodist Church. After all the poor and the unimportant had been collected, then by degrees came the socially and financially prominent, it being generally conceded that the boy or girl having the salutatory came next to last, while the valedictorian held the place of honour.

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 vegetables, freedom of the body, and regular exercise, were responsible for Mahala’s bright eyes, her rounded figure, her hard, smooth flesh. These things Edith coveted to an unholy degree, but not sufficiently to change one wrong habit or to shake off her natural indolence in order to attain them. Edith’s happiest moment was, in all probability, the one in which, dressed in the extreme of the prevailing fashion, she lay upon a sofa with a box of rich candy and wickedly read a French novel that she was not supposed to have and that no one ever knew precisely where she secured.

Commencement time marked a thrilling epoch in Edith’s life. A few days after the great event, she would attain the age at which her dying father had specified that she should come into full and uncontrolled possession of his large fortune. As the time approached, Edith spent hours dreaming of trips to New York and Chicago, of the beautiful clothing that she would purchase, and how these advantages would certainly add to her attractiveness to such a degree that finally she would succeed in completely overshadowing Mahala. She was so certain that this would be the case, that she had decided to make the first step the night of graduation. She had horrified both her uncle and her aunt by the extravagance of her outfit. She had persisted in making her own selections.

Commencement night found her in a nervous state bordering on a sick headache. She had been absent from school a great deal. She never had known what her lessons were about when they concerned mathematics, astronomy, or any difficult branch requiring real concentration and study. Her brain was almost wholly untrained; it kept flying off at queer tangents. With the help of her uncle and her aunt she had succeeded in getting together a creditable essay which she was supposed to read from memory. She had gotten through it on several occasions with slight promptings, but in the final class rehearsal, she had broken down completely and been forced to take refuge in the written pages held by the professor. After that, she had really studied, but it had been too late. She never had made public appearances as had many of the members of her class because she hated the mental work required to commit poems or orations to memory. She was too indolent really to work at anything because she never had been taught that in work alone lies the greatest panacea for discontent the world ever has known.

It was a general supposition in Ashwater that Commencement night should be the happiest period of a girl’s life. To many of them it was a happy period. There was joy of a substantial kind in the honest breast of little Susanna, who had been helped in a surreptitious way with her lessons and her clothing all through her school course by Mahala, and who, in turn, had worshipped Mahala dumbly and had returned all the help she could give upon knotty problems when her brain had begun to develop to a commanding degree. Many of the boys and girls who were to graduate that night had worked hard and conscientiously. They were proud of the new clothes they were wearing; eager to begin the life they had planned for themselves.

This class included the daughter of the dry-goods merchant. No one was happier than Mahala. She had worked hard all her school life. She had been perfectly willing to receive the same help from others that she was accustomed to give when she was more fortunate in mastering a difficult problem or a perplexing proposition in any of her studies. Her facility in music and the superficial part of her education, her quickness in picking up hints and indirections, the clever way in which she made her recitations, made her vastly popular with all of her teachers to whom she always showed a polite deference never equalled by any of the other pupils.

The valedictory was hers because she had earned it, and for several other reasons. Her mother had kept her eye upon that especial honour for her only child from the day of her birth. She had not arisen from the sheets of accouchement without having decided upon a great many things concerning the career of her little daughter, and one of the essential things had been the valedictory upon the night of her graduation. She and Mahala engaged in a number of long talks concerning this momentous occasion, and in the seclusion of their room, she and Mahlon discussed these things interminably. They were both agreed that Mahala must have the valedictory, quite agreed that she must honestly earn it. This the girl felt she had done. They were agreed that she must be exquisitely clothed. This was their part. They were unanimous as to a compelling subject; also she must handle it in an interesting manner; she must deliver her valedictory without a flaw in composition, delivery, or deportment.

Long before the remainder of the class had even thought of subjects, in the secret conclaves of her family, Mahala’s subject had been decided upon, outlined, and developed. Many things she had wanted to say had been ruled out for reasons paramount in the minds of Elizabeth and Mahlon. Once or twice a week, she had been put through her paces either by her father or her mother, occasionally before both. The thing had become so habitual with Mahala that she recited her valedictory every night before she went to sleep and snatches of it were in her mind many times during the day. In all this intensive study, she had dwelt upon pronunciations, upon phrasing, and inflection until she really had an extremely praiseworthy offering at the tip of her tongue, one which either Elizabeth or Mahlon could have delivered equally as well. All her life she had been making her bow and speaking her piece at mite societies and tea meetings, at Sunday School festivals, last days of school, and Grand Army celebrations.

To Mahala, Commencement night was not a thing of cold shivers, shaking knees, and throbbing heart. She had been trained from birth and was an adept at public appearances. She could recall no occasion in her life when she had come in contact with any of the other boys and girls in public in which she had not easily made the most attractive figure and carried off the honours.

At the noon hour, her father had said to her: “I’m going to stop at the Newberry House and tell the busman he needn’t come for you to-night. I don’t propose that you shall risk soiling your shoes and your dress by climbing into that dirty omnibus, even though there is a supposition that it is to be cleaned after the last load of drummers is taken to the train.”

Mahala hesitated a second, then she looked at her father with speculative eyes. “Don’t you think, Papa,” she said, “that it would be better for me to go with the others?”

There were nerve strain and asperity in Elizabeth Spellman’s voice that Mahala recognized. She gave Mahlon no chance.

“Mahala,” she said, “when Papa tells you that he’s going to do a thing that he has studied out and has decided will be the best thing for you, the proper answer for you to make is: ‘Yes, Papa. Thank you very much for your loving consideration.’”

“I was only thinking,” said Mahala, “that the other boys and girls might resent it; that it might make them feel that they were unfortunate not to have a father who had made such a success of life that he could do for them the lovely things that Papa daily does for me.”

Mahala looked at her father to see what effect this would have, and her heart took one surging leap and then stopped for an instant and stood still, frightened by the whiteness of Mahlon Spellman’s face. She noticed his grip upon the fork he was handling and that his hand was shaking so that he put back upon his plate the food he was intending to lift to his lips. For one long instant Mahala surveyed him and a little bit of the light went out of her eyes, the keenest edge of the colour washing in her cheeks faded. She saw the shaking hand, and in her heart she said: “Either Papa is dreadfully troubled, or he’s getting old; and come to think of it, he is nearly twenty years older than Mama. He’s been a darling papa, so I’ve got to begin taking extra good care of him.” Her mind reverted to the variety of care that always had been taken of her, and while she rebelled against a great deal of it, even as she was now rebelling against this distinction to be made between her and her classmates, she was placed where all her life she had been placed, in such a position that she would look heartless and ungracious to refuse.

“I am going,” said Elizabeth Spellman, “to spread a sheet all over the back seat of the surrey and on the floor. Jemima has wiped the seats very carefully and the steps, and swept the carpet until there isn’t a particle of dust. You cannot crowd into that omnibus without crushing your skirts. I think we can lift them in such a manner when you enter the surrey, that by occupying the back seat alone, you won’t need to sit upon them at all. It will enable you to head the procession down the church aisle with your frock as fresh and immaculate as when it is lifted from the form to be put upon you.”

“Very well, Mama,” said Mahala with a little sigh. “It’s awfully good of you and Papa to take so much trouble and I do appreciate it, but I cannot help thinking it would be better——”

“There, there, Mahala!” said Mrs. Spellman.

A queer, ugly red with which Mahala was very familiar crept into her mother’s cheeks. So nothing more was said on the subject until that night in the sweltering heat when the Newberry House omnibus had pounded up and down and across Ashwater, picking up a red-faced boy here, a perspiring girl there, pausing in state before the humble door of Susanna and shortly thereafter before the gate of the banker.

The surrey was waiting to take Mr. and Mrs. Moreland to the church. Junior’s mother came on the veranda with him and stood looking him over. Her face was very pale and her hands were trembling.

“Do you think,” she questioned eagerly, “that you won’t get frightened, that you can remember your speech?”

“You bet your life I can remember my speech!” said Junior boastfully. “When did I ever forget a speech, if I wanted to make one? Never broke down in my life. Why should I now? I’m going to try the old bank a little and if I don’t like it, I’m going to be a lawyer. I think it would be a lot of fun to be a lawyer, and you bet a lawyer doesn’t forget a speech. You needn’t sit and shake and worry, or Father either. Don’t have cold feet and hot sweats.”

The driver of the omnibus halooed and called to Junior to hurry, that he was two minutes late. In order to show his authority and his position in the village, Junior deliberately stepped inside the door. He could not think of a thing on earth to use as an excuse for having done so. His handkerchief was in his pocket, the notes for his speech he had placed himself in order that he might refresh his memory if he felt a bit rattled as his turn came to speak. He had no need to look in the mirror to see that he was as handsome as a boy well could be. His mother hurried after him.

“Junior, what is it?” she cried in a panic.

“Oh, I just thought I’d wet my whistle once more,” said Junior, starting toward the dining room. His mother hurried to bring him a drink of water, and when he was perfectly ready, Junior kissed her, telling her to get his father and hurry up because she should be in her place before the march down the aisle began. Mrs. Moreland, comfortable in the dignity of reserved seats, also took her time. She was to be separated from her lord who sat upon the platform as President of the School Board.

She left Mr. Moreland at the side door opening into the small room where the official board of the church transacted its business. He was the last one of the officials to arrive. His fellow townsmen and neighbours amused Martin Moreland that night. They stood so straight, their faces were so grave, they were gasping in the heat, they felt over their hair and held their heads at an angle calculated best to allow the perspiration to run down their necks without touching their stiffly starched high collars.

In casting his eyes over the gathering, he noted with satisfaction the absence of his old enemy, Mahlon Spellman. Not that Mahlon knew that he was the enemy of the banker. He did not. He thought that Martin thought that they were friends. There was no intuition which told him that Martin Moreland hated his precision of language, hated his taste in dressing, hated his poise and self-possession, hated to loathing scorn his fidelity to the paths of virtue, cordially hated any appearance in public that he ever had made. It certainly was unfortunate for Mahlon that only the spring preceding Mahala’s graduation his period on the School Board had elapsed and a new man had taken his place.

As Mahlon made his way down the church aisle with Elizabeth on his arm, he was probably the only man in the room who was not perspiring. A sort of clammy indifference seemed to have settled upon him. It was purely from force of habit that he ran his fingers over his hair, felt of his tie, and went through the old familiar gestures of flecking his sleeve and straightening his vest as he stepped into the light of the chandeliers and marched to the strains of the organ down to their reservations.

The unconscious Elizabeth was in the height of her glory. She had waited for this, she had prayed for this; only God knew how she had worked for it. She had just accomplished the delivery of her offspring at the side door of the church without a fleck of dust having touched her shoes of white satin, without a fold or crease disfiguring the billowing skirts of her frock. She had done her share perfectly. Never a fear crossed her mind that Mahala would fail. When had Mahala ever failed? Why should she?

As Mahala stood a second to shake out her skirts after stepping down, her mother had deliberately gone to the door and looked in upon the assembled graduates. She had eyes for only one figure. She wanted to see Edith Williams. Standing in the centre of the room, Edith had given her a distinct shock.

All day the girl had been nervous, frantically trying to remember her speech. In the humid heat of the evening she had gotten herself into a closely fitting dress of heavy white velvet. It was a dress that a queen might have worn upon a state occasion. Pearl-white like the shell of an oyster, very plain both as to waist and skirt—a dress that trusted to the richness of its material to make up for any lack of the elaborate trimmings of the day. As Edith had stood before her mirror giving the finishing touches to her toilet she had seen above the tightly embracing waist her face flushed with the strain of fear that she might forget her speech, her figure tense with the nerve strain of her unaccustomed public appearance. That minute she was wildly envying even Susanna who could have been called upon and recited any one of a hundred poems from the readers that had been used in the school course or supplementary works on elocution. The doubt and uncertainty in her mind had given to the girl a flashing vividness she never before had possessed.

Lifting her skirts around her, she had entered the omnibus and glanced at its occupants. She had said nothing until the driver turned the corner and started in the direction of the church. Involuntarily she threw up her hand, crying: “Stop him! He has forgotten Mahala!”

Instantly, Junior Moreland arose in his place, and catching a swaying strap above his head, leaned to the opening beside the driver and spoke to him roughly, crying: “Here you! You’ve forgotten Mahala Spellman!”

Without stopping, the driver cracked his whip over his team and plunged ahead. There was rather a dazed look on Junior’s face as he lurched back and dropped into his seat. Edith Williams leaned forward and with wide eyes looked at Junior.

“What did he say?” she cried.

“‘Father’s fetching her,’” answered Junior tartly, and it happened that he accompanied the information by a look at Edith. Unquestionably he saw the lunge of her angered heart. He saw the red blood surge up to her lips and paint her cheeks. He saw the black malice that stirred in the depths of her eyes. He caught the smothered exclamation, a shocking exclamation, that arose to her lips, and he knew, and every member of the class knew, that the bitter little “Damn!” which sprang past the lips of Edith Williams was unadulterated, forceful invective.

She was outdone in the first round. Mahala would not ride to the church with the remainder of the class. Why was she in that omnibus among the sons and daughters of blacksmiths, and cobblers, and lawn cleaners? Why had she not had the sense to think of having her uncle take her in their beautiful surrey? Why was she always letting Mahala Spellman get ahead of her? There rushed through her heart the conviction that when Mahala stepped through the door, in some way she would have managed, probably with half the money Edith had spent, to outdo her costume.

The velvet of her dress, rose-petal soft, shut her in like the walls of a furnace. The heat and anger in her eyes made her what she never before in her life had been—arrestingly beautiful. She bit her dry lips and clenched her gloved hands. What matter that she had bought herself what she felt would be said to be the handsomest basket of flowers that would be carried to the stage that night, with the imaginary name of an imaginary lover attached by her own hands to the handle? What matter that she had coached both her uncle and her aunt concerning the handsome offerings that they were to send up to her? In some way, Mahala would see to it that she would have finer. For one thing it was certain, after the expense of the piano lamp of four years ago, that Junior would stop at nothing. No doubt the basket he would send Mahala would far surpass hers.

When the omnibus stopped at the church door, with his usual lithe smoothness of movement, Junior was on his feet and out of it first. Instead of marching straight into the church in the lead, as all of them expected him to do, he had surprised them by turning, and with one white-gloved hand upon the door, he had looked into the eyes of Edith Williams. Instantly she arose, gathering her skirts around her, and made her way to the door. She laid her hand in Junior’s outstretched one; she encountered the look in his eyes in a state of dumb bewilderment. She came carefully down the three steps leading from the eminence of the omnibus. Her ears heard the sweetest music this world ever had vouchsafed to them: “I say, Edith, you are a riproaring beauty to-night! Keep your head up, and show folks how it’s done!”

In that instant Edith remembered that she knew her speech. A sort of cold self-possession washed in a big wave through her entire body. Her head tipped to a coquettish angle and she looked into the eyes of the boy she was passing so closely, with an alluring smile.

“Thank you, Junior,” she said in dry breathlessness. “I’m so glad you like me.”

Then she passed him and hurried across the sidewalk into the prayer-meeting room.

Junior stood his ground and gave his hand to the girls in turn as they alighted from the omnibus. In his heart he was saying to himself: “Oh, Hell! I didn’t say I ‘liked’ her. I was trying to say that she was good-looking for the first time in her life, and maybe the last. But if she could keep that up, she’d be some punkins to look at, and that’s the truth!”

Junior’s words had been overheard by the class behind Edith. They stood back, carefully scrutinizing her, and realized that what he had said was the truth.

Edith worked her way to one side of the room and from her left hand let slide down among the folds of her dress the copy of her speech that she was carrying. With a deft foot she kicked it under the seats, confident that no one had observed the movement. In this confidence she retained her poise and her pose, and it was thus that Mrs. Spellman saw her.

At that instant the voice of the organ, rolling an unaccustomed march, came to their ears. Again involuntarily the thing that was deep in Edith’s mind arose to her lips, “Mahala!” Mahala’s mother was standing in the door, smiling and bowing and speaking in her gracious way to all of the boys and girls, cautioning them to keep cool, to keep in mind the opening phrases of their speeches and the rest must follow; then she made way for the Superintendent, who ordered them to “Come on!” and in mechanical obedience, Edith led the way from the room. In the darkness of the early June evening she could see a blur of white waiting on the sidewalk.

In the order in which they were to sit upon the platform, the class fell into line. The sidewalk cleared of a waiting crowd of unfortunates who had not the clothing or the invitation to enter the coveted portals, who yet had come to press back into the darkness and watch the spectacle.

As Mahala advanced up the broad walk that led to the front steps of the church, there came scuffling through the crowd, she could not have told from where, a figure in white, as white as the new-born thoughts of white that contributed to her own dress. She realized that there was a catching and a snatching, an effort to make some one pause, and then she saw, scurrying up the steps before her, standing in the broad light of the open doors of the church, her bonnet lost in the crowd, Rebecca, her white flag lifted above the path the graduating class must follow to enter the doors. The figures of two working men in their shirt sleeves, with rough jests on their lips and their hands outstretched, started forward.

Mahala looked up. Her first thought was that never in all her life had she seen a figure so appealingly beautiful. Probably no one in all that crowd, since the day of her self-imposed appearance with sheltered face as the bearer of the flag advocating purity, had seen Rebecca Sampson as she really was. The years untouched by mental strain had left her the lovely rounded face of girlhood. The deeply shadowing headpiece, always stiffly starched and filled in with sustaining slats of pasteboard, had kept Rebecca’s complexion that of a little child. Her hands and arms were soft and white. Her throat, delicately rounded, was a miracle of whiteness. The plain white dress that she wore was as mistily white as the petals of a cherry bloom. The fringed flag that she held in Mahala’s pathway was as white as her dress. Suddenly Mahala threw out her hands.

“Never mind!” she cried to the men. “Let her alone! I have been passing under her flag all my life.”

She smiled on the crowds pressing forward on either side of her.

“You know,” she said, “somehow this seems fitting. I rather like the idea of passing under Becky’s emblem of purity on Commencement night.” She half turned and called back to the other boys and girls: “Come on! Let’s all pass under the white flag with Becky’s blessing. Maybe it will help us to remember our speeches.”

She raised her skirts and stepped into the full blaze of light falling from the church doors, and like a misty veil of purity, she shimmered and gleamed as she climbed the steps. Her head was as yellow as sunshine, her eyes were deep wells of blue-gray, and her long, dark lashes swept her pink cheeks, while the smile with which she went toward Rebecca seemed to Jason, crowded tightly against the wall of the church looking up at her, the loveliest thing that this world could possibly have to offer. To him the gold head and the billowing skirts of gauzy fineness made Mahala look like a gold-hearted white rose.

Immediately back of her, with her head tilted and a new light gleaming in her eyes, came Edith Williams. There was a smile on Jason’s lips. It was lingering from the vision of Mahala as she had bent her head and lifted her hands to her breast for the blessing of “Crazy Becky.” But the smile merged into an expression of aroused indignation. His thought had been that Edith Williams looked like a lily that needed a gold heart, but that thought quickly passed, for with uplifted hand, she struck aside the white flag and entered the church door. The crowd outside heard Rebecca’s shrill curse: “To the devil, you velvet-clad jade! You have a black heart—as black as your head!”

Little Susanna, ever anxious to save any unpleasant occasion, came next, crying to Rebecca: “My turn now. I want to go under your flag, Rebecca!” Instantly Rebecca was all smiles again and the flag was back in place while her lips were murmuring a blessing.

Down the line, Junior had heartily sympathized with the uplifted hand. What mummery that a crazy woman should be allowed to stand there! She might even come into the church and spoil the graduating exercises. He said to the men standing nearest him: “Watch her! Don’t let her get into the church. She’ll spoil everything. She ought to be taken to the lock-up at a time like this.”

But as he came up the steps, Junior had not quite the courage to subject himself to the black curse that had fallen upon Edith. With a shamefaced grin and a muttered, “Better avoid a fight,” he ducked under the flag and hurried into the church. Following the example of the graduating class, the Principal, the Superintendent, the high-school teachers, and the School Board passed under the flag to Rebecca’s intense delight. The last man in the procession was Martin Moreland. Since he could not be first, he had deliberately chosen to be last. He would be more conspicuous in the outside seat than he would be between two other men. As he came up the steps, Rebecca’s eyes fastened on him. Instantly, she whirled the flag from over the head of the man before him and snatched it to her breast. She folded her hands over it and held it there tight, crying to the outraged banker as he advanced: “Woe upon you, Martin Moreland, despoiler of white flags, despoiler of white women! The blackest curse of the Almighty is waiting for your head!”

Martin Moreland’s outstretched arm swept her off the steps and backward into the crowd.

“Take that crazy helion where she can’t possibly get into the building,” he said. “I’ll hold you responsible if it happens.”

Exactly who was to be held responsible, no man knew. It was Jason who made his way through the crowd, put a protecting arm around Rebecca, who whispered into her ear words that would calm and soothe her, who led her to the outskirts of the crowd and saw her safely started on her homeward way before he slipped up the stairs and found a seat in the suffocating balcony from which he meant to watch until he saw whether his gift gained any attention from Mahala.

It was not until they were seated that Edith Williams had an opportunity surreptitiously to take a full look at Mahala from behind the screen of her swaying fan. Mahala had been ahead of her. From the sidewalk, behind her mother’s back, she had secured a full-length look at Edith, and she had been as distinctly shocked as had Junior. There was no gainsaying the fact that Edith was wearing an exquisite gown, and for that night at least she was lovely. Mahala suspected that the red lips and the pink cheeks were painted, and there she partially misjudged. Edith was painted, but Junior had been the artist. She decided that Edith’s dress was probably the most expensive in the church, that it was wonderfully lovely, but it was not appropriate for the occasion. She felt that it was not in as good taste as was her own; but there was a pang of disappointment, because the verdict in her favour would not be so easy, or so unanimous, as it always had been. Many in the house that night would think Edith quite as beautiful as she and more handsomely gowned.