They could see something was troubling him greatly. They did go away, and they did not understand, but they felt very sorry. After that Todd, without telling the reason, left off studying hard and took to rambling in the woods again.
"Aren't you going to try for the prize, then?" they asked him.
"I wouldn't stand any chance against Young," he answered. But the others were not so sure about that.
Meanwhile every hour brought final examinations sixty minutes nearer, and Young, all alone in his little bake-oven of a room, was studying as probably no student had ever studied in that old room before. Sometimes he felt that even his powerful constitution would not stand the strain much longer; but he could not afford to break down or die until after commencement, until after disgrace had been averted from his family name. It was that thought which kept his heavy eyelids open.
Examination week was like a long, hideous nightmare.
There were tasks that seemed superhuman to perform, and with them the sickening dread that he could not perform them. When the last paper was finished and handed in he had a horrible conviction that he had lost the prize. He felt sure of it.
But he could not be sure until commencement day itself, and before that came four days of preliminary commencement gayety. Each one of these contained for Young twenty-four hours of suspense, and these were worse than examination days—there was nothing to take his mind off what he did not want to think about. He could not sleep. His nerves were used up; and everybody else was so happy!
The campus was bright with hundreds of attractive girls in summer costumes, and alive with rollicking old graduates holding noisy reunions. But even at the baseball game, when the nine was beating Yale and everyone else was crazy with exultant joy, Young was saying to himself: "How should I break the news to mother? Should I let matters take their course, or—what are they all cheering for now? Oh, I see, Cap has made another hit!"
The worst of it was that he had no one to take him out of himself. Nearly all his classmates and all his intimates were packing up and going home, as Freshmen usually do, without waiting for commencement. Luckily they had not voted to celebrate their Sophomorehood! He wandered about all alone; and all alone he went in to hear his fate decided on commencement morning.
Near the door he stood, squeezed in beside some graduates he had never seen before, who wondered why this long, gaunt undergraduate started so when the clerk of the Board of Trustees arose and began to announce the fellowships and prizes.