Awake with dawn, Marjorie had slipped on a soft, pink negligee and curled herself up on her window seat for a quiet little session with herself. A pensive wistfulness lay in her brown eyes as she gazed dreamily out at the beauty of the sunlit morning. Her mind harked back to her first days at Sanford High School. Again she saw herself a timid outlander, entering the great study hall for the first time. It seemed ages ago. How quickly her four years at high school had sped! There had certainly been plenty of vicissitudes. Compared to the joys that had been hers, they paled to insignificance. She marveled that she should have been so abundantly blessed. Face to face with the end of her course, she could only regret that she had not done more to deserve these benefits. Untouched by false pride or vanity, she could not know how great a power for good she had been. Very humbly she bowed her head in a silent prayer of thankfulness to the Divine Source from whence all blessings flowed.
At breakfast, however, this retrospective mood was temporarily banished by her General’s teasing sallies. Later, as she donned her exquisite graduation gown of white chiffon, reverence again flowed over her like a mantle. When at ten o’clock her father assisted her into the waiting limousine with much ridiculous ceremony, she presented an unusually lovely vision of radiant girlhood. Only the faint brooding light in her eyes gave sign of the deeper emotion that lay behind them.
The Commencement exercises were to be held in Sanford Hall, a good-sized auditorium on an upper floor of the high school building. The anteroom was to be used as a meeting place for the graduates. From there they were to march, two by two, into the main auditorium. The first three rows of seats at the left of the large room, roped in by broad white ribbon, had been reserved for them. In contradistinction to the custom of many high schools, none of the graduates were to read essays. As valedictorian, Lucy Warner was the only one of them to be publicly heard. The pastor of the First Episcopal Church of Sanford was to address the graduates. The President of the Board of Education and Miss Archer were also to make short addresses. To the former belonged the privilege of announcing the winner of the scholarship.