Buchman grieved but was not surprised. In October 1919 he had written, 'Dan is dying by inches. He will not live long.' He co-officiated at the funeral in the American Church, and Dan was buried in the cemetery at St Germain. Mrs Buchman wrote from Allentown, sending a poem which she had found among Dan's papers. Buchman later put the first two stanzas on his parents' gravestones, and chose the third stanza for his own:

He lives! In all the past,

He lives! Nor to the last

Of seeing him again will I despair.

In dreams I see him now

And on his angel brow

I see it written, 'Thou shalt meet me there.'

On the day of Dan's funeral, a telegram arrived from Prince Paul of Greece saying that, following their talks in Lucerne, he would like to come to America with Buchman and attend college there. Buchman postponed his own return to wait for him, only to hear, some time later, that the plan had been cancelled because the Greek people had voted for the return of the monarchy. In the interval, Buchman went to Cambridge to fulfil a promise made in China to Bishops Moloney and White to visit their sons. He also found several Princeton friends there.

President Mackenzie, hearing he was going to Cambridge, had recommended Buchman to his old fellow-pupil, Professor John Oman, a University lecturer based on the Presbyterian seminary, Westminster College. There Buchman was received as part of the Senior Common Room. He attended Oman's lectures, but his main interest was the university men he met. 'I often had three breakfasts,' he told friends later, 'one with the working crowd, then the next with the non-workers and then with the Indian princes.' Soon he was writing his Princeton friends that 'it would be ruinous to leave at this time'24 and to Dean Jacobus explaining that he must stay, or 'if my stay embarrasses you, I should sever my connection with Hartford if that is a way out of the difficulty'.25

President Mackenzie, plainly annoyed at this extra absence and reasonably so, replied that he did not want the connection to break, but that if Buchman offered his resignation he would be compelled to recommend it.26 The situation was, however, patched up once more.

Buchman, in fact, did not return till just before Christmas, for which his parents joined him at Hartford. It was their last Christmas together. His father died in the Hartford nursing home on 7 March 1921. The doctor's telegram reached Mrs Buchman too late for her to leave Allentown to see him. Buchman, who had been summoned from Boston, wired her: 'Father's home-going was peaceful. Wonderful crossing the bar. He felt you here ... I arrived in time for him to know me and he died holding my hand. Your letter was God-timed. Love, affection. We must be brave. Frank.'27

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