“Oh, you know, uncle, when a cadet resigns for any cause which involves no dishonour, we have a little ceremony.  I want you to see it.  No college has that kind of thing.  Don’t be late.  I will join you in time.”

The captain and Leila attracted much attention from the cadets at dinner in the Mess Hall.  “Now, dear, look!” said Penhallow.  At the end of the long table a cadet rose—­the captain of the corps in charge of the battalion.  There was absolute silence.  The young officer spoke: 

“You all know that to our regret one of us leaves to-day.  Mr. Gresham, you have the privilege of calling the battalion to attention.”

A slightly built young fellow in citizen’s dress rose at his side.  For a moment he could not fully command his voice; then his tones rang clear:  “Most unwillingly I take my farewell.  I am given the privilege of those who depart with honour.  Battalion!  Attention!  God bless you!  Good-bye!”

The class filed out, and lifting the departing man on their shoulders bore him down to the old south dock and bade him farewell.

Penhallow looked after them.  “There goes the first, Leila.  There will be more—­many more—­to follow, unless things greatly change—­and they will not.  I hoped to take John home with us, but he will come in a week.  I must leave to-morrow morning.  John is in the dumps just now, but Beauregard has only pleasant things to say of him.  I wish he were as agreeable about the polities of his own State.”

“Are they so bad?”

“Don’t ask me, Leila.”

The capital of available energy in the young may be so exhausted by mental labour, when accompanied by anxiety, that the whole body for a time feels the effect.  Muscular action becomes overconscious, and intense use of the mind seems to rob the motor centres of easy capacity to use the muscles.  John Penhallow walked slowly up the rough road to where the ruined bastions of Port Putnam rose high above the Hudson.  He was aware of being tired as he had not been for years.  The hot close air and the long hours of concentration of mind left him discouraged as well as exhausted.  He was still in the toils of the might-have-been, of that wasting process—­an examination, and turning over in his mind logistics, logarithms, trajectories, equations, and a mob of disconnected questions.  “Oh, by George!” he exclaimed, “what’s the worth while of it?” All the pleasantly estimated assets of life and love and friendship became unavailable securities in the presence of a mood of depression which came of breathing air which had lost its vitalizing ozone.  And now at a turn in the road nature fed her child with a freshening change of horizon.

Looking up he saw a hawk in circling flight set against the blue sky.  He never saw this without thinking of Josiah, and then of prisoned things like a young hawk he had seen sitting dejected in a cage in the barracks.  Did he have dreams of airy freedom?  It had affected him as an image of caged energy—­of useless power.  With contrasted remembrance he went back to the guarded procession of boys from the lyceum in France, the flower-stalls, and the bird-market, the larks singing merrily in their small wicker cages.  Yes, he had them—­the two lines he wanted—­a poet’s condensed statement of the thought he could not fully phrase: