“Why, Mr. Boardman!”

“Don’t be bashful, Boardman?” young Mavering called out.  “Come in and show them how I shall look in five minutes.”

Mr. Boardman took his introductions with a sort of main-force self-possession, and then said, “You’ll have to look it in less than five minutes now, Mavering.  You’re come for.”

“What?  Are they ready?”

“We must fly,” panted Mrs. Saintsbury, without waiting for the answer, which was lost in the incoherencies of all sorts of au revoirs called after and called back.

VII.

“That is one thing,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, looking swiftly round to see that the elder Mavering was not within hearing, as she hurried ahead with Mrs. Pasmer, “that I can’t stand in Dan Mavering.  Why couldn’t he have warned us that it was getting near the time?  Why should he have gone on pretending that there was no hurry?  It isn’t insincerity exactly, but it isn’t candour; no, it’s uncandid.  Oh, I suppose it’s the artistic temperament—­never coming straight to the point.”

“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Pasmer eagerly.

“I’ll tell you sometime.”  She looked round and halted a little for Alice, who was walking detached and neglected by the preoccupation of the two elderly men.  “I’m afraid you’re tired,” she said to the girl.

“Oh no.”

“Of course not, on Class Day.  But I hope we shall get seats.  What weather!”

The sun had not been oppressive at any time during the day, though the crowded building had been close and warm, and now it lay like a painted light on the grass and paths over which they passed to the entrance of the grounds around the Tree.  Holden Chapel, which enclosed the space on the right as they went in, shed back the sun from its brick-red flank, rising unrelieved in its venerable ugliness by any touch of the festive preparations; but to their left and diagonally across from them high stagings supported tiers of seats along the equally unlovely red bulks of Hollis and of Harvard.  These seats, and the windows in the stories above them, were densely packed with people, mostly young girls dressed in a thousand enchanting shades and colours, and bonneted and hatted to the last effect of fashion.  They were like vast terraces of flowers to the swift glance, and here and there some brilliant parasol, spread to catch the sun on the higher ranks, was like a flaunting poppy, rising to the light and lolling out above the blooms of lower stature.  But the parasols were few, for the two halls flung wide curtains of shade over the greater part of the spectators, and across to the foot of the chapel, while a piece of the carpentry whose simplicity seems part of the Class Day tradition shut out the glare and the uninvited public, striving to penetrate the enclosure next the street.  In front of this yellow pine wall; with its ranks of benches, stood the Class Day Tree, girded at ten or fifteen feet from the ground with a wide band of flowers.