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 ==CHAPTER XXVII==

THE next morning Hugh’s mother and fa¬ ther arrived in the automobile. He was to drive them back to Merrytown the day after commencement. At last he stood in the doorway of the Nu Delta house and welcomed his father, but he had forgotten all about that youthful dream. He was merely aware that he was enor¬ mously glad to see the “folks” and that his father seemed to be withering into an old man. As the under-classmen departed, the alumni be¬ gan to arrive. The “five year” classes dressed in extraordinary outfits—Indians, Turks, and men in prison garb roamed the campus. There were youngsters just a year out of college, still looking like undergraduates, still full of college talk. The alumni ranged all the way from these one-year men to the fifty-year men, twelve old men who had come back to Sanford fifty years after their graduation, and two of them had come all the way across the continent. There had been only fifty men origi¬ nally in that class; and twelve of them were back. What brought them back? Hugh wondered. He thought he knew, but he could n’t have given a