West Point, in the whirl of graduation week, was brimming with activity and alive with visitors from every part of the country. Hardly a first classman but had some member of his family come to see him receive his diploma, and many had a little crowd made up of parents and young brothers and sisters, full of eager pride and interest in their son's and brother's new honors. All over the broad parades and along the shady paths by the river cadets were walking with their friends from home, or friends from near at hand, enjoying their day or two of comparative leisure after the hard laborious grind of their daily lives. Officers, visiting officials, women and girls in their brightest summer finery, mingled with the ever-present gray, brass-buttoned coat and white trousered uniform of the corps, but in the midst of the life and gayety of a lot of young people gathered together many minds this year were thoughtful, and many hearts anxious and heavy.
Bob Gordon, in four months risen from second classman to first classman and now to second lieutenant, was too enormously interested in all these changes, with their strange and wonderful possibilities, to feel serious all the time, especially with his long three years at West Point over, graduation so suddenly come and his family there to see it and to hear the hundred things he had not had time to write about.
"It's great to see you all here," he said twenty times a day.
It was true that when the hour for graduation exercises came, when he and his classmates received their diplomas from the hands of the Secretary of War, who in April had presented theirs to the real class of 1917 with the same simple ceremony, most of Bob's fellow graduates paused to think how many of that class had already followed General Pershing to the battle-field. The Secretary's address, always direct and brief, this year became suddenly true and real and vivid as he spoke, summoning the old ideals of the corps, and listening, Bob saw the heights of patriotism and sacrifice no longer dimly splendid but close at hand, and that hour near when every ounce of valor and endurance would be sorely needed which the twenty-year-old lieutenant could summon to his service.
Even "Benny Havens'" familiar words were changed to the singers and quickened into life.
"May we find a soldier's resting-place, beneath a soldier's blow,
With room enough beside our grave for Benny Havens, oh!"
But after it was over, Bob's gay smile chased away the shadow from his parents' eyes in the moment he came to shake hands and be congratulated before he hurried off to say a hundred good-byes.
They were all to leave West Point by the noon train on graduation day, and Lucy could hardly wait with reasonable patience to get Bob safely home.