“I’m going to tell you right now, that until I have to I’m not going to worry.  I’m going to try to be happy in my senior year.”

CHAPTER XIX

CAP AND GOWN

“Nature never pretends.  She gives her secrets only to the unpretending.”—­The Murmuring Pine.

The fifteen dollars, after all, were disposed of in a highly satisfactory manner.  They paid for Lydia’s senior cap and gown.  Perhaps there were other members of the class to whom their senior insignia meant as much as they did to Lydia, but that is to be doubted.

Although, ever since her illness, she had firmly resolved never to worry again over her meager wardrobe, she almost wept with joy when she first beheld herself in cap and gown.  For she looked exactly like other girls!  It didn’t matter at all, this year, whether or not she had a new suit or a new overcoat.  The gown was all-concealing.  Donning it was like turning from caterpillar to butterfly with a single wave of the hand.

Amos and Lizzie were as much impressed as Lydia, but for different reasons.  Lizzie was sure that the gown was proof and evidence that Lydia had compassed all human knowledge.

“Land, Lydia,” she murmured, walking slowly around the slender figure, “it makes you look terrible dignified and I’m glad of that.  No one could look at you now and not feel that you know an awful lot.”

Amos was unimpressed by Lydia’s stores of wisdom but it seemed to him that there never was such a lovely face as that which looked out at him from under the mortar-board cap.  There was a depth to the clear blue eyes, a sweetness to the red lips, that moved him so that for a moment he could not speak.

“It’s an awful pretty idea, wearing the cap and gown, isn’t it!” he said, finally.  “Somewhere, back East, there’s a picture of one of your ancestors who taught in an English college.  You look something like him.”

“Did I have that kind of an ancestor?” asked Lydia with interest.  “Isn’t it too bad that we Americans don’t know anything about our forebears.  I wonder what the old duck would say if he could see me!”

It was the rainiest Fall within Lydia’s recollection.  It seemed, after the drought was once broken, as if nature would never leave off trying to compensate for the burning summer.  The dark weather had a very depressing effect on Amos and instead of growing more resigned to his friend’s death, he seemed to Lydia to become daily more morose and irritable.

In a way, Lydia’s conscience smote her.  She knew that her father was worrying over her attitude on her inheritance, but she continued to avoid the issue with him while the estate was being settled.  Lydia was doing heavy work in college.  She actually had entered all the classes in dairying possible, while carrying her other college work.  And she enjoyed the new work amazingly.