And as for me, I sat all night at the dormitory window and listening to the creak and groan of the old Revolutionary oak in the quadrangle, thought of many things: of the walks we had taken, of the hundred smiling adventures we had shared, of all the glad things he had taught me—and then, of the girl—and of the tragic face of her—as I had seen it last.
And I wished that he had lived only a few minutes longer so that I might have pleaded with him and shown him where he was wrong. And, perhaps, in those few minutes he would have reached out his hand to me, and begged forgiveness for having called me what he did—perhaps he might have done so—and oh, I wanted with all my heart to forgive him and tell him it did not matter—and to wish him God-speed.
But in a few days, when I summoned enough courage to go up the hilly road in search of the little old store, I found it closed. The cracked shades were down before the windows, and a "For Sale" sign was on the door. The father and daughter had moved away, I heard in the town; but no one knew where—or why.
But when I was back in the dormitory, I took the book of "David Copperfield" from under my pillow, and put it back in the library, and did not attempt to read further in it, then.
VII
FRESHMAN YEAR
New adventures must be prefaced by new hopes. My entering college meant the starting of a thousand new dreams, ambitions—and seemed to me an opening gate to a land stronger than any I had yet heard of: a land of real men, virile, courteous and kind, whose thoughts were never petty, whose breadth of mind unfailing.
It was only a few weeks after Sydney's death that I took my college entrance examinations. I had taken the "preliminaries" the year before, and I entered upon these "finals" low in spirit, disinterested, very much aware of how poor a training for them this last year at military school had given me.