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 There was a moment of silence. Then;

"I'm glad you saw it in time," Carlos Dix said. The men in the principal's office were beginning to find seats around a long library table. Abruptly the lawyer walked into the meeting room and closed the door behind him.

The graduation exercises were held on one of those hot, hushed humid nights that sometimes find their way into the last week of June. The ushers, tip-toeing up and down the side aisles, had long ago opened the auditorium windows to their full. In front of the platform the school orchestra waited patiently for the signal that would sound the school hymn as an exit march. On the stage, near the center of the first row of graduates, Praska held his diploma in one hand and tried hard not to screw up his face as a maddening, tickling drop of perspiration rolled slowly down his nose.

"I feel," Perry King groaned, sotto voice, "as though my collar were melting and running down my back. Mr. Rue is going to speak. I guess this is the end."

But the principal merely introduced Carlos Dix who, he said, would speak for "the Northfield Alumni."

"The influence of a good school," began Carlos Dix, plunging directly into what he had to say,