“The next girl I get engaged to,” sighed Greg, “I’m going to insist on marrying instantly.  Then there’ll be no danger of losing her.”

At the dock, Anstey, Durville, Douglass and other grads. waited, though the majority of the members of the late first class were already speeding to New York on a train that had started a few minutes earlier.

“I couldn’t bear to go down by train, suh,” explained Anstey in a very low voice.  “I want to stand at the stern of the steamer, and see West Point’s landmarks fade and vanish one by one.  And I don’t reckon, suh, that I shall want anyone to talk to me while I’m looking back from the stern of the boat.”

“Same here,” observed Greg, with what was, for him, a considerable display of feeling.

Then the boat swept in, and the West Point party went silently aboard.  All made their way to the stern on the saloon deck.

That evening the class was to meet, for the last time as a whole, at one of the theaters in New York.  And the late cadets would sit together, solidly, as a class.

Friends of graduates who wished would attend the theater, though in seats away from the class.

Dick and Greg’s relatives and friends were all to attend.  More, they were to stop at the same hotel.  The next forenoon the ladies would attend to some shopping.  Then the reunited party would journey back to Gridley.

A dozen or so West Point graduates stood at the stern of the swift river steamer.  The captain of the craft, a veteran in the river service, knew something of how these young men just out of the gray felt.  For the first five miles down the river the swift craft went at half speed.  Then, suddenly, full speed ahead was rung on the engine-room bell, and the craft went on under greatly increased headway.

“Well, gentlemen,” murmured Anstey, moving around and walking slowly forward, “the United States Military Academy is the grandest alma mater that a fellow could possibly have.  I’m glad to be through, glad to be away from West Point, but I shall journey reverently back there any time when I have any leisure in this bright part of the good old world.”

How sweet the joys of the great metropolis!  Yet these joys would have palled had our travelers remained there too long.  The following afternoon they were again journeying toward what is, after all, the one real spot on earth—–­home!

Gridley well-nigh went wild over its returning West Pointers—–­though now West Pointers no longer.

One of Dick Prescott’s first tasks was to go proudly to Dr. Bentley, to state that he had had the wonderful good fortune to win Laura’s heart, and to ask whether her father had any objection.

“Objection, Dick?” beamed the good old physician.  “Why, lad, for years I’ve been hoping—–­yes, praying that you and Laura would have this good fortune.  Wherever you may be stationed in the world, you’ll let our daughter come back to us once in a while, I hope.”