" Each time
there was a shout of applause; each time the campus rushed in
a wave. And still the three hundred stood packed, waiting--
thinning a little, but so little. About thirty had been taken now,
and the black senior hats were visibly fewer, but the upturned boy
faces seemed exactly the same. Only they grew more anxious minute
by minute; minute by minute they turned more nervously this way
and that as the seniors worked through the mass. And as another
and another crashed from among them blind and solemn and happy
with his guardian senior close after, the ones who were left seemed
to drop into deeper quiet. And now there were only two black hats
in the throng; the girl looking down saw John McLean standing
stiffly, his gray eyes fixed, his face pale and set; at that
moment the two seniors found their men together. It was all over.
He had not been taken.
Slowly the two hundred and fifty odd men who had not been good
enough dispersed, pluckily laughing and talking together--
all of them, it is safe to say, with heavy hearts; for Tap Day
counts as much as that at Yale.
John McLean swung across the diagonal of the campus toward
Welch Hall where he lived. He saw the girl and her chaperon
come out of Durfee; and he lingered to meet them.
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