“My reports of grades are long since in and I’ve answered the university bell for classes for the last time till year after next. Can you wonder that I am a little crazy?”
This mild way of figuratively throwing up his hat amused Shirley, but she was as careful of her father’s dignity as he; so she slipped out from his arm and said, “Here comes a student up the walk, Father. Come on, Mother. Dad has probably flunked him in something. Never mind, Daddy, you will soon be away. I’m packing, too, and I need Mother anyhow. ‘In pace requiescat,’” Shirley added, waving her hand toward the unseeing student who was knocking on the screen, just as Shirley and her smiling mother left the room.
Just what point Shirley had in mind in applying the Latin expression to the supposedly unhappy student, she did not explain, but it was probably the only Latin phrase that occurred to her at the time. Whatever was the lad’s errand, the professor made short work of him and as the student began to whistle as soon as he reached the street some responsibility must have been lifted.
It was a little hard for Shirley that her father and mother should leave before she could, but it could not be helped, and if Shirley had a lump in her throat, no sign of it showed in her bright face as she blithely waved a last goodbye to Dr. and Mrs. Harcourt, whose faces she could see through the Pullman window as the train began to move. But she turned away rather soberly and the young man with her without a word took her arm to lead her back to the car which stood waiting.
Shirley swallowed, winked a moment, then lifted smiling eyes, dark, with curling lashes, to her tall, slim companion. “I’m all right, Dick. There’s just that funny, all-gone feeling, you know.”
“Yep,” returned Richard Lytton. “I’ve had it. Remember when I went to military school? When I stood on the platform in my new uniform, just a mere kid, you know, and saw the train disappear with my father on board, going home without me,—O boy!”
“You were such a little chap, weren’t you? But you seemed terribly old to me, and I remember how impressed I was when you came home at the Holidays wearing that uniform.”
“Little idiot that I was!” laughed Dick, drawing Shirley out of the way of a truck loaded with trunks. “More students going out on the next train,” said Dick, glancing at the truck. “There’s that freshman trying to catch your eye, Shirley.”
Shirley looked in the direction of Dick’s nod and smiled at a plump youth who was looking at her with interest. She waked up to her immediate surroundings a little with her bow to the boy who was in one of her father’s classes and whom she had met several times at her own home. She could not know how very much interested the freshman was or why he said to himself, “That’s only her cousin.”
The small station of the college town was busier than usual with the departure of students. As Dr. and Mrs. Harcourt had made their plans to depart at the earliest moment possible, their leaving was coincident with that of many others, though trustees had largely gone before.