A knock at the door aroused him, and he shouted an invitation to enter, thinking that Cardington had stepped across the hallway for a chat. His surprise therefore was great when the door swung open and showed an unknown man placing his dripping umbrella in the corner.

"I got your message, professor," the visitor began. Leigh was instantly aware, above everything else, of the extraordinarily alert glance which he flung into the room ahead of him as he entered. This summed up his total first impression.

"Mr. Emmet!" he cried. "Come in. This is really too bad. I 'm afraid Captain Tucker did n't give you the message correctly. I meant to call upon you. He must have represented that I had some urgent business—but I need n't say how I appreciate your coming, especially on such a night."

"All kinds of weather are alike to me," Emmet answered heartily. "I was up in this part of town, and thought I might better drop in and see you than send a postal."

Now that he was seated, Leigh had a better opportunity for observation, and his fuller impression was decidedly favourable. Emmet was apparently about his own age, of medium height, with the shoulders and bearing of an athlete. He possessed no strikingly fine feature, and yet the whole man was handsome. One took no notice of the shape of his nose or the line of his chin, for these points were neither excellent nor the reverse. What gave him a claim to distinction above his fellows was the splendidly abundant vitality that appeared unmistakably in the rich colour of his cheeks, in his very posture, and in the brightness of his reddish-brown eyes. It remained to be seen whether this brightness might indicate intellect as well as health. For the rest, for the quality that betrayed the man, his expression was not to be read at a glance. Its major message seemed to be goodfellowship, but the seeming failed to strengthen into certainty on closer inspection. Here was a man who could think hiddenly, speak guardedly, wait for others to show their cards, and do all this with a disarming appearance of ingenuous friendliness. The atmosphere he radiated as he sat waiting for his host to explain himself was one of tension without nervousness.

Leigh began as most men would have begun under the circumstances. He fostered the subject of the weather for a few minutes longer, and produced a box of cigars.

"I never smoke, or drink either, for that matter," Emmet remarked simply. "A politician is like a barkeeper; he can do his business better if he lets drink alone. As for cigars, try one of mine. They 're part of my stock in trade. I guess this one won't explode and set fire to the place."

Leigh smiled as he lighted the cigar, which he found to be a good one. There was something that made for freedom in the unintentional officiousness with which his guest had thrust aside his hospitality and substituted his own.

"Possibly," he ventured, "you might imagine that I have some plan in mind to hand over to you the vote of the college."

"A deal like that would please the bishop," Emmet returned, with unexpected irony.

"It would please his daughter, at any rate, as I believe you know."

"Yes," Emmet assented, with a nod. "I know what a good friend of mine Miss Wycliffe is."

"We were talking last night," Leigh continued, "about political conditions here in Warwick; and I became very much interested, for municipal reform is one of my hobbies. Wherever I 've lived, I 've always been against the machine, at least to the extent of my vote. Miss Wycliffe told me that you were trying to break up the clique that has ruled Warwick since the war; and when she saw how much she had enlisted my sympathy, she proposed that we become acquainted. That's how I happened to send a message to you by the captain. I did n't know when you were likely to be most at liberty." He paused, and flicked the ashes from his cigar. "I feel guilty to think that I have stolen some of your time, when I have nothing to give you in return but good wishes."

It was impossible to guess whether Emmet were surprised or disappointed at this disclosure of the comparative futility of his visit.

"Good wishes," he said, "are always worth having, and especially from this college, for I tell you there are mighty few men connected with this place that wish me well."

Leigh, remembering the bishop and Cardington, did not doubt the truth of this declaration. He wondered what his colleague would surmise should he come in at that moment. The situation would be complicated, and would no doubt gain in interest, but it was an interest he was content to forego. He was impressed by a hint of passion and resentment in his guest's voice, restrained as by one not entirely sure of his hearer.

In Leigh's attitude there was no affectation. He was genuinely interested in the situation, and he brought to it all a Westerner's lack of class prejudice, all his appreciation of a man for his intrinsic worth, irrespective of college degrees and family and fortune. It was some time before Emmet, feeling his way by little and little, realised the anomaly of a professor in St. George's Hall with Democratic sympathies. Miss Wycliffe's judgment of the two men, her belief that they would get on well together, was entirely justified by the result, which became undoubted before an hour had passed. Emmet was by no means lacking in shrewdness, and, having once become convinced that caution was needless, he talked more freely, until, to his listener's interested observation, he appeared quite another man. He began to show some of that eloquence of which Cardington had spoken, an eloquence that derived its effect not from the artifices of rhetoric, but from a deep conviction and a personal grievance. He spoke in adequate language, that left no doubt of his meaning, and the meaning itself was sufficiently striking to rivet attention. Leigh began to realise why it was that the bishop had thought him dangerous. He forgot to wonder at Emmet's gift of speech in the new point of view that was gradually presented to his mind. He was struck particularly by the fact that St. George's Hall, which seemed to him comparatively insignificant in the educational world, should loom so large in this man's horizon that the towers which stood to him for star-gazing and cloistered study and old tradition should appear to Emmet merely the bulwarks of class privilege and social tyranny.

The fact that Leigh was a stranger in Warwick must have given his guest a peculiar sense of freedom. One has only to recall the confidences which men that meet casually on the train will sometimes repose in each other, to realise how this can be. Under such circumstances, each tells his story to unprejudiced ears, without fear that it will one day be turned to his disadvantage. Nor was this the first time in Leigh's life when he had been surprised to find himself the recipient of another's secrets. The conversation finally became almost a monologue, or, more specifically, a statement of grievances.

"I would n't mind, if the campaign were being conducted on the square," said Emmet, now thoroughly aroused; "but it is n't. It's hard work to talk against money, and they 've got barrels of it. They 're putting it now where it will do the most good. A thousand dollars to this saloon-keeper and another thousand to that, to keep their heelers away from the polls on election day, may do the trick for them, no matter what I say or do or am. And it's college-bred men, professional men, who are doing it. The whole of the wealthy and educated element of Warwick is leagued against me, and bound to beat me by fair means or foul."

"Corruption in politics is common enough everywhere, I 'm afraid," Leigh remarked.

"It's worse here," Emmet declared bitterly; "and here it's a question of class against class as well. Warwick is said to be the wealthiest city of its size in the country, and the offices have been handed around in a certain set ever since the Declaration of Independence. The labour unions are uncommonly strong, too, and if they would only hang together, they could have things their own way. I can depend upon the support of my own crowd, but there are always mutual jealousies to be reckoned with between the various unions. Besides, the labouring man will talk boldly enough at times about equality, but he still has a sneaking admiration for the fellow that lives in a big house, and a corresponding distrust of one of his own kind. Let me give you an illustration of it. The other day, Judge Swigart's manager, Anthony Cobbens, was swaggering around the barn down here, talking with some of the men about his horses and dogs, and poking a little fun at me on the side. Such things have their effect. I heard one of the men say afterward that Cobbens was as friendly with them as if he were n't rich at all. It's a fact that he was flattered by the fellow, even when he saw through him."

There was something rather magnificent in the scorn that blazed in the speaker's eyes as he told this incident, and Leigh felt that, no matter what his faults might be, sycophancy never was and never could be one of them.

"It's all the more pitiful," he remarked, "because he gets nothing for it but the contempt he deserves. But I 've heard of this Cobbens. It seems to me that Miss Wycliffe compared him to a weasel."

Emmet laughed, but almost immediately the intensity of his mood returned. "Cobbens is one of your own graduates," he went on, almost as if he held his listener responsible for that fact. "I knew him as a boy, and played with him on the streets. Perhaps that's the reason he 's my worst enemy to-day. His mother was a dressmaker and a widow, but somehow, by hook and by crook, he managed to work his way through St. George's Hall. Then he became a lawyer and married one of the richest girls in town. What she saw in him, nobody knows, but he's a hypnotist, and no mistake. Now she's dead, and so are her parents, and Cobbens and his mother live in her great house and ride in her carriages. He 's a high roller, right in with the judge and his crew, and there is n't a more corrupt politician in this town. There 's a fine specimen of your college graduate!"

"I hope you don't regard him as a typical college graduate," Leigh protested good-naturedly.

Had he been familiar with the alumni of the Hall, he could have made his argument strong by personal examples unlike Anthony Cobbens, but he made his defence of the college graduate general, answering the well-known objections to him in the well-known way. It was evident that Emmet regarded colleges and universities as identified with entrenched privilege everywhere, and with corruption in local politics particularly. It was inevitable that he should have been influenced in this view by his own concrete experiences. The iron had entered into his soul, and its scar was not to be effaced by an evening's conversation. Not infrequently life will be interpreted to a passionate nature by one or two persons, be they friends or enemies. To Emmet, Cobbens and the bishop loomed much larger in the general scheme of things than their intrinsic importance warranted. It was interesting, having heard the bishop's opinion of Emmet, to get Emmet's view of the bishop, a view that was by no means without a certain reluctant respect and admiration. Leigh felt that his prejudice was impassioned, rather than intellectual, and would yield gradually to a change of circumstances, whereas the bishop would never revise his judgment. He was impressed also by the fact that Miss Wycliffe could never fully appreciate the conditions that had produced the man whose cause she had chosen to champion, or see that he must needs be a radical, if he thought at all, at least in the present stage of his development. Leigh's own experience in life enabled him to look into both camps with comprehension, for he belonged to the comparatively small class of the cultivated poor, and his struggles had been no less intense than those of the man before him, though for different ends. The effect of what he said was conciliatory, but his visitor was merely convinced that this particular college graduate was an exception to the rule.

"You 're not much like the bishop," he remarked. "I don't say that he is n't the real thing in the way of a gentleman, but he 's as proud as the Old Boy himself."

"I don't know how proud the Old Boy may be," Leigh answered, laughing, "or what he has to be proud of, but I 've discovered that Bishop Wycliffe, underneath his apparent frigidity, has one of the kindest hearts in the world."

"We all know that," Emmet assented. "He's one of the most charitable men in town. I 'm bound to say, too, that he does n't know anything about the inside workings of that political ring, but it's because he does n't want to know. He just naturally ranges himself with his own class on such a question."

He had progressed from an alertness that was not free from suspicion to a fervid statement of the political situation, into which the element of his personal feelings had risen more and more to the surface. So naturally did he appear to take the mention of Miss Wycliffe that Leigh had not realised how deeply flattered he must have been by her interest. Now, at last, his very posture showed a sense of being at home, and into the brightness of his steady eyes an expression entered which could best be described as confidential.

"I meant to ask you," he said, "who it was that began to talk about me at the bishop's."

Leigh considered a moment. "We were all discussing politics—I really don't remember."

"And did Miss Wycliffe take my part against the old man?"

The question arrested Leigh's attention, and traversed his consciousness with a positive shock. It was he who was now on guard. He would have repudiated the insinuation that he was jealous, and yet, when a man is in love, jealousy in some sort may extend even to those who cannot possibly be his rivals. As he divined that Emmet was inclined to put too personal an interpretation upon Miss Wycliffe's generosity of feeling, he was concerned to think that she might have misplaced it, that this man might have the presumption to misunderstand her. He became singularly forgetful of what had occurred at the bishop's house, and seemed not to hear a further intimation from Emmet, to the effect that he believed Miss Wycliffe was more than a match for her father. It was now that Emmet discovered a greater possibility of likeness between the bishop and his host than he had suspected so short a time before. His evident curiosity in regard to Miss Wycliffe's real purpose in sending the professor to him remained ungratified, and the necessity which now faced him of retreating from a position in which he had not been met caused him to take his actual departure presently with something of his earlier restraint of manner. They separated, like Glaucus and Diomedes, representatives of different camps, who entertained for each other personally the greatest good-will and respect. It may be, however, that each gave this assurance with mental reservations more or less subconscious.

When Leigh was once more alone, he walked up and down his room restlessly for some time. His first sensation was one of exasperation with Miss Wycliffe for her ill-advised championship of a man who actually seemed to have the assurance to think of her otherwise than as his patroness and good friend from afar. If she suffered embarrassment from it in the future, he reflected, that was only what she might have anticipated. It would be a delicate matter to let her know her mistake. More than that—it would be impossible. Her own instinct and good sense would come to her rescue in time. Meanwhile, there was Emmet. It was delightful to think how she had failed to see his point of view, while sure that she saw it so well. He could not wonder that the man's head was slightly turned, and now that he was gone, Leigh felt no personal resentment on that score. As he reviewed the conversation of the evening, he wondered which were really the more dangerous to the state, Emmet, full of personal grievances and undigested theories, or his opponent, Judge Swigart, the cynical and aristocratic politician. If Emmet desired at present to turn the existing order of things topsy-turvy, it was because such a revolution would place him at the top. The judge, already nearer the top, was naturally a champion of things as they were, which included his position as it was. Though Leigh mused in this sophisticated vein, he nevertheless felt considerable confidence that the younger man, when he became a finished product, would be a better citizen than his political rival.



CHAPTER VI

LENA HARPSTER

The bell in the cupola of the First Church had just rung out the hour of midnight, and the slow, deep notes, which seemed to derive a certain solemnity from the graveyard below, were carried in broken echoes to the very suburbs of the city on the wings of a moist, intermittent wind. The storm of the previous night, which had lifted during the day, now seemed about to begin anew, and the air was full of a sense of unshed rain. Down in the street, where bits of waste paper and other small refuse spun around under the swaying electric lights, the huge cleaner, called "the devil waggon," was just beginning its nocturnal task. In front of the City Hall, lately such a scene of busy life, a solitary car stood ready to start upon its homeward trip, its two violet lamps winking in the wind like a pair of sleepy eyes. Only the all-night drug-store on the opposite corner kept up an appearance of wakefulness by means of a corona of milk-white lights that made a brilliant spot in the comparative obscurity of the long thoroughfare.

Whatever poetical or imaginative suggestions might lie in this scene for others, it made no such appeal to Tom Emmet as he strode along, passing belated pedestrians in his course. He had just come from a protracted consultation with his political lieutenants, and deep in the maze of his own plans the twelve beats of the bell now reminded him that Lena Harpster must have been waiting for his coming a full hour by the gate where they had planned to meet. Even this thought could scarcely soften his mood as yet. Sure of the experience that awaited him, he was content to postpone it till the actual moment. Politics was a fact, and his love was a fact, and each was assigned its appropriate time. This eye for the actualities of the moment was characteristic of the man. A street to him was only a thoroughfare, in which there were certain things that concerned him personally, or through which he must pass to reach a definite destination. To Leigh, on the contrary, it was sometimes a comparative unreality, a vista suggesting thoughts of Thebes and Babylon and Rome, a symbol of life's pilgrimage, a path where multitudinous sounds blended into a universal chant of the voyager. It was perhaps this difference that constituted an element of attraction between the two men. The star-gazer admired the practical qualities that made for success in the world below his tower, and the politician paid an involuntary tribute to a spirituality above his own.

Lena Harpster also heard the midnight bell, as she stood in the shadow of a row of tall brick mansions and gazed patiently down the alley, listening for her lover's step. She was undoubtedly as pretty a girl as could be found in Warwick; so pretty, in fact, that when she applied for a position as maid, experienced housekeepers were wont to balance her attractions against the probity of their men-folk. Not infrequently they decided that the former might weigh heavier in the scale, and reserved the place for one less favoured. She was tall and slender, with a light step and a winning grace of movement. When she spoke, her voice was pitched in a key that was pleasantly low and musical, whether from lack of physical force, or because of timidity, or in unconscious imitation of those she served. But more likely this characteristic was merely an expression of innate refinement; for Lena was of native American stock, educated in a country school of some merit; and she regarded herself as a lady, compared with the Irish maids and coloured cooks among whom her lot was cast.

Her throat was long, with a skin of peculiar whiteness. When her sleeves were rolled back while she washed the most valuable of her mistress's glasses, her arms were seen to be of such a satin smoothness as to invite instinctively a caressing touch. And one felt assured, without trying the experiment, that her resentment at such a liberty would be expressed only by a gentle and deprecatory withdrawal. This same whiteness of her complexion was enhanced rather than marred by the presence of a few faint freckles, that suggested sunny fields and the wholesome associations of country life. When excited, her grey eyes shone with a luminous brightness, as if all her vitality were gathered there, while an unexpected colour came and went beneath the delicate texture of her skin.

But of all Lena's attractions, none was more marked than her smile. It was frequent and unaffected, almost maternal in its good nature and indulgence, and disclosed two rows of little teeth, pure and fragile in appearance as porcelain. Yet this smile, so inviting to those who wished to be invited, was disillusioning to cooler and more discriminating observers, for in it her ordinary quality was disclosed, her redundancy of sweetness, her lack of that intellect which enables a woman to triumph over the ravages of time.

As she waited there by the gate, she marked the lapse of time by the cars that passed the end of the alley at intervals of fifteen minutes, occupied not so much with thoughts as with sensations, both those of the moment and those of anticipation. The air was delightfully soft, like that of springtime, and she responded to its caress much as a flower responds, lifting her face placidly to the sky. The atmosphere had now reached the point of saturation, and her fine hair was moistened as by a heavy dew. From time to time she gave an affectionate touch to some small creature which she held warmly in the bend of her arm beneath her cape, or turned her head to listen to the stamping of the horses in a near-by stable. Directly across the alley, a large, half-finished building lifted its walls in the dim light, like a ruin, exhaling from its yawning windows a mingled odour of fresh pine boards and plaster; and toward these squares of blackness she sometimes turned a look almost childish in its suggestion of vague timidity.

At last, when she had lingered long past the time agreed upon, she sighed, but without resentment, and resigned herself to disappointment. She wished to see him this night in particular, for she had something of importance to tell. He had forbidden her to write, and she accepted this tyranny as she accepted the man. Without reflecting deeply upon this elaborate caution of his, the secrecy of their courtship made an appeal to a certain demand of her own nature for concealment and mystery. Where a spirited girl would have questioned and resented, she merely acquiesced.

She had almost abandoned hope when she caught sight of him in the circle of electric light at the far end of the alley. He gave a quick look to left and right before turning in her direction. She would have known that alert turn of the head in any crowd, and now, as his footsteps sounded nearer and nearer, along the narrow board walk that skirted the fences, she unlatched the gate and came out to meet him. When almost upon her, his eyes caught first the white strip of apron beneath her dark cape, and then the dim little face above bending forward for a greeting.

"Well," he said, in a low tone, "did you think I was never coming, girlie?"

She leaned against him with a contented sigh. "You have come, Tom, and that's all I care about."

As he pressed her to him, the kitten, which had lain concealed till now in purring contentment beneath her cape, leaped to the ground and disappeared in the darkness.

"How I hate a cat!" he exclaimed, startled. "I 'd like to set my dog on the beast." His irritation merely elicited a little ripple of amusement, for though she was submissive to his will, she was never afraid of his censure. "Come," he continued; "this is no place to stand. We will go into that new building across the way."

He took her hand and guided her between scattered blocks of stone, over a shaking plank, and into the darkness she never would have ventured to enter alone. The large room in which they found themselves was already floored. The smell of fresh plaster, which was perceptible even from without, was here intensified, and he sniffed it with relish, for such works of construction always appealed to his nature. An open window, facing the street, admitted a misty illumination from the electric light beyond, and disclosed in one corner a heap of boards.

"Now," he said eagerly, taking her almost roughly by the shoulders and turning her about, "give me a kiss."

All the graciousness and charm were with her, all the strength with him. He was an abrupt and dictatorial lover, but she was a born sweetheart. At the moment when her arms were twined about him she most perfectly expressed herself. He drank in her kisses thirstily; then grasped her wrists firmly and removed them from his neck, as if he realised a peculiar responsibility.

"There, Lena," he protested, "that will do." But he still continued to hold her wrists. "Just like a couple of pipestems," he remarked. "How easily I could break them!"

She accepted the comment as a tribute to her delicacy, a proof of his strength. It was this strength that drew her, so that she swayed toward him involuntarily; but even though it contained an element of possible cruelty, it was not purely physical. Perhaps a realisation of this fact allowed her to shelve upon him entirely the responsibility of her impulsiveness.

"Come over here, Tom," she pleaded, drawing him into the corner, "and sit down. I want to tell you something. Besides, I 'm half dead with standing."

The hint of pathos in her last words was lost upon him, for he was almost incapable of appreciating physical weariness. He knew her ready forgiveness also so well that he took it for granted, without even offering an explanation of his lateness. It was characteristic of their relationship that he felt no desire to tell, nor she to hear, the details of the political struggle now drawing to a close. She was too purely his sweetheart to share his cares; her loving embrace sufficed for their lightening. Even in the shadow of their retreat they could see each other's faces distinctly, hers moonlike, with hair like an halo of the moon, and his of more swarthy hue. If she was beautiful in his eyes, he fulfilled no less her ideal of manhood; and certainly an impartial witness could not have said that either judgment was unfounded.

"Well," he began, after surveying her a few moments with appreciation, "out with it. Some new man is chasing after you. Who is he?"

She leaned her face against his shoulder, then sat up and shook her head prettily, pleased with the thought of his jealousy.

"I can't help it, Tom. That impudent little Hollister Pyle won't give me a moment's peace."

"What does he do?" Emmet catechised grimly.

"He makes a grab for me every time I pass him on the stairs; that is, when his mother is n't looking."

"Why don't you turn around and break his face?" he demanded angrily, lapsing into graphic vernacular. The suggestion was obviously too absurd to need reply. "I 'd like to get my hands on the young whelp," he went on, squaring his shoulders. "I would n't leave a whole bone in his body."

"You can't do that, Tom, dear," she expostulated, in gentle alarm.

"No, I can't," he admitted reluctantly. "It would n't do to be pinched for assault and battery only a fortnight before election. I won't write him a threatening anonymous letter, either. That is n't my way of doing business. I tell you, Lena, you 've got to get rid of him, yourself."

"I will," she declared, with what was, for her, a tone of decision. "I 'm going to leave to-morrow."

"That is n't getting rid of him; that's running away," he fumed, profoundly dissatisfied. "You 'll meet the same sort of thing in the next place. Why don't you stay and fight it out?"

"I don't like the girls, either," she explained. "They 're all against me."

"A lot of cats," he muttered. "But where are you going?"

"To Bishop Wycliffe's."

"No!" he cried.

"Why not?" she questioned. "It 's an easier place than this one. There are no young men there, Tom. That ought to satisfy you. I saw Miss Wycliffe to-day."

"I don't like the bishop," he said, with some hesitation, as if aware of the lameness of the objection, "and he does n't like me. There 's no man in this town more opposed to me than he is. I don't want you to go there."

"You never let me do what I want to, Tom," she complained despairingly.

He caught her in his arms and gave her an exasperated kiss. The logic of the argument was with her, and he could meet it only by an unreasonable prohibition. "I don't want you to go, anyhow," he reiterated.

"But I 've got to go somewhere," she insisted, placing her two hands upon his shoulders. She attempted to give him a little shake, with the result that she shook only herself. His physical immobility was so suggestive of his mental attitude that she desisted, with sudden meekness, and the point was apparently settled as he wished. He possessed himself of her hand, and began to stroke the inside of her arm, as if he had discovered a new charm in her.

"If you did n't give him what he deserved, what did you do, Lena?" he demanded, going back to the incident that had aroused his jealousy.

"I drew away, Tom."

"As gentle as a kitten, and without a word, too, I 'll be bound. You 're altogether too pretty—that's the trouble with you. I ought to put you in a cage, to keep you safe."

"Tom, dear," she said suddenly, "I hear the Pyles talking about politics when I wait on the table. They say that you have n't the ghost of a chance to be elected. Now that you 've thrown up your job, what will you do if you are defeated?"

He emitted a short laugh, expressive of confidence and scorn. "You were n't such a little fool as to suppose I intended to stand on the back of a street-car all my life, were you? Five years of that sort of thing is about enough for me, and I 've worked it for all it was worth." A desire to impress her overcame his innate secretiveness. "There 's more in that job than the measly salary the company pays; and a man 's entitled to take something of what would be his by rights if things were as they should be in this world. There 's a higher law than the law made by the privileged few for their own enriching, and sometimes a man has to take the matter into his own hands and decide what's due him." This was rather an elaborate way of telling her that, like most of his fellows, he was accustomed to "knock down" fares on crowded trips, when it could be done undetected. Perhaps he took some satisfaction in going over again the arguments by which he justified the practice. Perhaps he was curious to see whether she would make a condemnatory comment, but nothing was further from her thoughts, and he went on. "I have n't spent a cent of my baseball salary for years. Where do you suppose it is?"

"In the savings bank?" she suggested.

He chuckled at her simplicity. "Better than that—salted down—invested. I could live on the interest of it, after a fashion, if I wanted to." He was flattered by her wide-eyed admiration and wonder, and moved to disclose himself to her still more. "Why, look here, Lena, there 's more than politics in this game. They say I have n't the ghost of a show. We 'll see about that; but whichever way it turns out, I shan't be a beggar. Only, if I am elected, I 'll take every cent I 've got and put it into the bonds the city is going to issue to build the new bridge. There's nothing better in the country than the bonds of this town. None of your Central America rubber bonds or Colorado mining stock for me. I want something I know about and can keep my eye on."

"Then you are n't poor!" she cried gladly. "You're rich!"

He squared his jaw determinedly, and his eyes glowed. "Not rich yet, but I will be—I will be yet!"

She did not doubt that he could be anything he wished, but from this very confidence in his power a great fear was born. She put her lips close to his ear, and whispered tremulously: "Tom, dear, I know you think I 'in pretty, and all that, but do you love me, Tom? When you get to be mayor, or when you 're rich, will you love me just the same? You won't be too proud to think of marrying me then? Tell me you won't!"

She withdrew herself and placed her hands on his shoulders as before, an attitude pathetically suggestive of her effort to fix his attention upon her words. The poise of her little head was extremely winning in her desire for his admiration. "Do you think I would make a pretty wife, even for a mayor?" she faltered.

He caught her once more in his arms, as if the word wife had awakened within him a curious intensity of feeling, but for once she was not satisfied. Gradually her slender form became shaken by a storm of convulsive sobs. He waited in silence, with all a primitive man's uncomprehending distress at a woman's tears.

"Don't borrow trouble, Lena," he said simply. The tone, more than the words, showed that his mood had become stern, almost resentful. In fact, it was the first time she had given him anything but pleasure, and pleasure was all he desired from her.

His answer was not what she had hoped for, but her woman's wisdom forbade her to press the matter then. Of his love she felt no doubt; the intensity of his look, the well-nigh fierce impulsiveness of his caresses, showed her that the appeal she made to him was almost irresistible. Almost, but not quite. She could never be in his company long without a consciousness of the warring elements within him—on this side love, on that side ambition, fighting foot to foot and point to point, neither strong enough to win the victory. Sometimes he would gaze at her in silence, with his warm, speculative eyes, until, drawn like a fascinated bird, she fluttered to his arms in the hope of the great decision, but her hope was never realised. Now she divined that tears and prayers would not help her cause; he must be allured by her charm, not driven by her claims upon his compassion.

At this thought she recovered her composure and dried her eyes, and strove with success to make him forget her importunity. Disarmed and soothed, he sunk down to a lower seat beside her and rested his head boyishly upon her lap. He pushed back her short sleeve, nestled his face in the bend of her arm, and kissed it hungrily. The action, their relative positions, introduced a new element into their relationship, to which her deep maternal instinct made quick response. With a new tenderness she threw the fold of her cape about his head and shoulders, and held him close. Thus they sat for some time in silence. Beyond the warm shelter of her cape he heard the faint soughing of the wind, which had brought the rain at last, a drowsy and monotonous rain that lulled his senses. Instinctively he rested heavily upon her in weary abandonment. Finally his form relaxed, and she saw that he was fast asleep.

The strain of the position upon her back and arms grew greater each moment, till it was almost more than she could endure; but still she held out bravely, fearing to move lest she should wake him from the sleep he seemed so much to need. She knew also that his waking would mean separation, and she could not bear that thought as yet, before she had discovered the secret of success. What could she do more than she had done to make herself indispensable to him? That was the question which she turned over in her mind with such intensity that she almost lost her sense of growing distress. Indeed, the distress of body and mind seemed strangely one, the physical tension but an expression of the mental.

It was idle, she reflected, to think of studying politics to keep pace with his widening interests. She had only a vague conception of the extent to which his mind had been enlarged by contact with the world, but she was shrewd enough to know that companionship in such interests was not what he desired in her. In her he sought only rest and charm and love. Nor was it dress in which she lacked, unless, indeed, he desired her to deck herself like the rich women of the society he scorned. Just as a nurse's habit possesses a fascination for some men, so she had seen that her little cap, her very apron, though badges of servitude, made a peculiar appeal to his tenderness. Other men, too, had thought them becoming. It was a dress to reveal her beauty. Her curves were the softer for its severity, her colour the more radiant against that black and white. On the street also she knew he could find no fault with her. Like many a pretty woman of her class, she possessed a skill in dressing like a lady, and ability in making small means cover great needs, that amounted to genius. No—there was only one thing to do, and that was to love him more and more, until a consciousness of her love so pervaded him, even when absent, that he must finally come back to her to stay.

The cars had long since ceased to pass, and the silence of the dead of night settled down over the city. She heard the coloured cook saying good-bye to her lover at the gate where she herself had waited, their low, melodious voices and happy gurgles of laughter as soft as the damp wind that came puffing in through the open window. After what seemed an interminable lapse of time, an automobile went past, like a miniature whirlwind, dashing the raindrops right and left from its gleaming sides, bearing some late revellers through the deserted streets at a rate of speed forbidden by the traffic of the day. Even that incident became a distant memory, and now only the occasional howl of a prowling cat broke the stillness, a strangely ominous and mournful sound. In the bar of light upon the floor at her feet the shadow of the tossing branches of a tree moved continually, till she closed her eyes in dizziness.

Hours passed, hours that seemed a lifetime. The pain extended through her whole frame, and tears of mute suffering dropped slowly down upon the flap of the cape that kept her lover warm. From time to time she shifted her position gently and won a temporary relief, but presently the sense of strain returned, and yet she would not waken him and let him go. It was the first time she had ever seen him asleep,—one of love's tenderest experiences,—and moreover he was sleeping with a sense of absolute peace and security in her arms. She longed to slip down beside him, to rest her cheek against his, and to go with him into that shadowy world of dreams.

Suddenly out of the darkness a soft little form, wet with the rain, leaped lightly upon her. The discarded kitten had found its mistress at last. Gentle as the impact was, it sufficed to disturb her balance, and she sank slowly downward in a faint. Her arm, locked about his head, saved her from a fall, but the pressure of her body awoke him. He struggled confusedly, oppressed by a sense of suffocation and by a vague fear; then, scarcely awake, he caught her in his arms.

"Lena!" he cried, startled by the inexplicable change. "Lena!"

He touched her cheek, he listened in vain to hear her breathe, and then an icy terror gripped his heart. Scarcely knowing what he did or why, he raised her carefully in his arms and carried her to the window, where the fine rain sifted in upon her face. He felt her shiver slightly, and then her eyes were looking into his.

"Thank God!" he said brokenly. "I thought that you were dead."

She smiled, and moved her face toward him. He took her once more to their former seat, and continued to hold her in his arms as if she were a child.

"I feel better now," she murmured. "It was nothing, Tom. You fell asleep, and I held your head until I toppled over—that was all. Were you frightened?"

"I thought you were dead," he repeated, deeply awed by the grim spectre so foreign to his experience.

"And did you care so very much?" she ventured, her heart beginning to beat high again. For answer he gently raised her cheek to his and held her close. There was no need of words to tell her how much he was moved, for he had never held her thus before. Through her lover's strange moods of fierce tenderness and stern denial she had won her way at last, as she now believed, to a perfect understanding. He could not live without her; it was merely a question of time.

His continued tenderness gave her reason to believe that this assurance was justified. Only at the gate, when he bade her good-night, did he seem to be seized once more in the grip of contending emotions. He started to go without a word or kiss, then, turning back, he took her in his arms with a grip that hurt, calling her his Lena, his little girl, his wife. The last word broke from him with an intensity that caused the blood to riot in her heart, a joy that was shot through with wondering fear of the passion she had aroused.

When his figure had disappeared in the darkness, she left the gate and entered the kitchen through the low window which the cook had left unlocked against her coming. She lighted a candle, and looked at herself curiously in a mirror that hung on the wall. The grain of the cheap glass distorted her features, but reflected faithfully her heightened colour and the drops that sparkled like jewels in her light hair. Apparently she was satisfied with the inspection, for she smiled happily, and then went slowly upstairs to her narrow room beneath the roof.

Meanwhile, Emmet was striding along the gleaming street, regardless of the increasing rain that soaked him to the skin. From time to time he shot out his arm violently, as if he would push back some invisible foe, or would extricate himself from the meshes of a net that was closing in upon him. Again, he swore aloud, as one who curses a malign and unmerited fate.



CHAPTER VII

THE STAR-GAZERS

In the following night the storm terminated its triduan existence some time between darkness and dawn. It must have been in the earlier hours that the change occurred, for Warwick gazed from its windows in the morning to find the ground rimed with hoar-frost, that looked like streaks of crusted salt. The sun was scarcely three hours in the ascendant before the frost disappeared, like the withdrawal of a silvery veil, disclosing the bareness it had beautified so briefly. Even the most casual observer could now see that autumn had made a long forward march in the last three days toward the confines of winter.

That afternoon Leigh called upon Miss Wycliffe, not without a thought that the interval which had elapsed since the dinner was decidedly short. Still, he would come ostensibly to report the result of the interview she had suggested, and, as the election was not far distant, he felt that this excuse, if one were needed, was entirely adequate. To his chagrin, he found that she was not at home. The maid informed him further that she had gone to New York for a week. As he walked slowly away, he wondered almost resentfully at this sudden disappearance, as if he felt that she ought to stay in Warwick and watch the result of her experiment. But he did not consider that if the daughters of men would be clothed like the lilies of the field, they must seek periodically the place most remote from the solitude in which their models grow.

The week that followed was one in which autumn flung out all her brave banners in a final pageantry. The nights were cold and still, with stars peculiarly brilliant. Each morning the mists hung like fleecy cobwebs in the valley, filaments that parted and drifted away at the touch of the sun, disclosing the magic work of the nocturnal frosts upon the foliage of the trees. It seemed to Leigh, looking from his eyrie, that Nature had never before painted a panorama of such wondrous beauty. Here a solitary elm in the meadow below the cliff, in the region which the collegians called "over the rock," stood forth all crimson against the green sward; further on, the woods began, masses of yellow and red maples, with scattered pines and oaks of more sombre hue, billowing gently upward toward the blue of the distant skyline.

It was now that the young astronomer began to take up once more the pursuit that had been so long interrupted. He felt that if he were to accomplish something, he must begin a series of observations with a definite end in view. There was also another motive than the desire of professional reputation—a wish to increase his worth in Miss Wycliffe's eyes by achievement. Her absence from town, though of only a few days' duration, freed him from the distraction which the very possibility of seeing her presented, and night after night he ascended to his watch-tower.

But he presently discovered that it was one thing to take observations on Mount Hamilton, where no other claims occupied part of his time, and quite another to watch by night and teach by day. The bishop was right in saying that his chief occupation must needs be the teaching of elementary mathematics to undergraduates. For any satisfactory results, prolonged observations must be made from twilight to dawn, and such periods of wakefulness were impossible when he must present himself before a class at nine o'clock in the morning. Not that this was necessary each day. His hours were irregular, but the morning classes were sufficiently numerous to break up the continuity of his observations, and to render their results unsure.

In this quandary, he ought, perhaps, to have abandoned his purpose and to have taken up some problem in pure mathematics, but here the perversity of human nature interposed. The forbidden, or at least difficult, road was the one he desired to travel, and he could not make up his mind to turn back, though he saw no prospect of going far. Instead, he began to make a few preliminary observations at random, and enjoyed the sight of the familiar constellations as one enjoys a return to old faces and associations. For the present he swept the skies leisurely, feasting on the infinite wonders which no consuetude could render commonplace. He longed for some unusual phenomenon in the sidereal tracts, a comet, or a temporary star, one of those strange wanderers that appear for a time, attain a brief and vivid maximum, and vanish into the darkness from which they have emerged. But only about a score of such objects had been credibly reported in historic times, and he searched the thoroughfare of the Milky Way, the region in which they were wont to appear, with small hope of reward.

One morning he received a letter from Miss Wycliffe, in which she named that night, if the skies were clear, for the observation she had mentioned at the dinner. He had almost forgotten the wish she then expressed in the greater importance she seemed to attach to her plan to help Emmet. Now he was surprised to discover that this matter, which had put him to such pains, had apparently slipped from her mind altogether. It gave him a conception of the multiplicity of her interests. It was as if she could not attend to all her charitable plans in person, but, having chosen a responsible agent, she dismissed the subject from her mind. Nor was he offended that she did not seem to consider the possibility of his having another engagement. On the contrary, the omission might imply her knowledge of the absolute unimportance to him of any claims compared with those she chose to make. Thus his love fed on crumbs invisible to her from whose table they had inadvertently fallen.

Had he been less infatuated, he might have divined in this omission one of those unconscious revelations of character—the selfishness of a spoiled and petted woman, who has come to assume that the convenience of others must necessarily coincide with her own. But Leigh saw only a hint of something confidential between them. He experienced also that peculiar intensity of interest which attends a lover's first glimpse of his mistress's handwriting. Even if it were commonplace, it would seem to him like no other in the world; but here there was really something distinctive. The letters were almost microscopically small, and crowded into the centre of the page with the effect of a decorative panel. He carried the epistle about with him all day, and observed the weather with solicitous attention, but no change occurred. The turquoise sky remained without a cloud. Fires from burning leaves sent up sluggish pillars of smoke, that spread out equilaterally above the trees in the windless air.

It so happened that he had the afternoon to himself. The prospect of inaction was intolerable, so he went down into the cool vaults below the Hall to take out his wheel for an afternoon of exploration. In these subterranean regions, perhaps more here than elsewhere, the imaginative appeal of the Hall was still present. As he prepared his wheel for the trip, which he meant should be a long one, he glanced up at the arched windows, down whose wide, slanting sills the sunlight poured in a flood of dusty gold. The walls of these foundations were five feet in thickness, built as if to keep out an invading host. Even in this unfrequented place, each stone was carefully cut, and fitted with exact nicety in its place. There was no rubble, no mere filling. Here was a lavishness of expenditure, a conscience in building, rare in modern times. Leigh looked down the long succession of massive archways, dwindling into the distance, with vague thoughts of the Castle of Chillon and the Man with the Iron Mask. When he ascended again into the warmth and sunlight of the open air, he had a passing sense of having emerged from a brief incarceration.

He pushed his bicycle through the maple walk to the brow of the hill from which he had first looked over the valley toward the west. There in the distance the village he had noted sparkled like a handful of white dice thrown carelessly down against the earth. He fixed upon this point as the terminus of his ride, and began to coast down the long slope, leaving a trail of grey dust to mark his flight. There was a peculiar exhilaration in the dry heat of the October afternoon. Flocks of crows passed over his head with raucous cries. The cornstalks were stacked in serried array, like Indian wigwams, and heaps of apples, red and yellow and russet brown, lay ungathered in the orchards.

Through this rich and varied scene he sped swiftly, filled with all a Westerner's keen appreciation of a New England landscape, constantly contrasting the arid glories of deserts he had seen with the plenty about him. The farms of the fertile tracts of California were infinitely greater, the methods by which they were worked more modern, but about these smaller homesteads hung an atmosphere of history and romance. Leigh might champion the West in the presence of the bishop, but now, alone with his own thoughts, he paid tribute to the land in which the liberties of his country had been cradled. He seemed to have known it of old, though he now saw it for the first time. This experience was not a discovery, but a reacquaintance. From these old farmhouses, with their sagging roof-trees and windows filled with small panes, the minute men had issued with their muskets to repel the invader. At yonder sweep-well some English soldier had perhaps stopped in his dusty retreat for a drink of water, and had paid the penalty of his life for the delay. Above all, the fact that this was the native country of the woman he loved was ever present in his mind to add radiance to the afternoon.

At a point where the road took a sudden dip and curved in a wide sweep toward the southwest, his attention was arrested by an old house that lay nestled in the bend as in an encircling arm. The colour had once been red, but was now faded by many suns and washed thin by innumerable rains. A rampart of loose stones, overgrown with brambles and broken in places as if for the passage of cattle, enclosed the premises, and the typical well of the country lifted its curving pole in the front yard only a few feet from the roadway. Two women were seated on the worn stone slab in the opening that served for a gate, evidently basking in the afternoon sun and engaged in desultory chat. When Leigh dismounted from his wheel and asked for a drink of water, they moved slightly to let him pass, and he went up to the well to help himself. He lowered and raised the dripping bucket, not without awkwardness and a sense of pleasure in the unaccustomed task, as well as a memory of the poem which had immortalized that simple operation. It required only a casual glance about to see that this was a poultry farm. At the back of the house he saw a number of chicken runs, where a man was engaged in repair work. The air was filled with the comfortable clucking of hens, the most cheerful of country sounds. From his present slight elevation he had a view also of the trolley line which bisected the farm and crossed the road a few yards further on.

As he paused, before going on his way, to thank the women for their courtesy, he was struck, as he had not been at first, by the appearance of the younger. So delicate she seemed, so daintily dressed, that he wondered to find her in this rustic setting. In her lap she held a small basket of eggs, and he guessed correctly that she was a visitor, waiting for the next car to Warwick. He asked the distance to his destination, and from her appeal to the older woman he learned that they were mother and daughter. During these few moments he began to realise that she might well be called a beauty, though her pale, ethereal type was not one that made a personal appeal to him. Her whole figure was steept in sunshine, and as her lips parted in a smile, he noticed how the strong rays penetrated her cheeks, filling her mouth with a faint pink light and intensifying the whiteness of her teeth. Just so they penetrated the shells of the white eggs in her basket.

This picture remained with him for some time. The girl had appeared almost as fragile as the burden she carried, and suggested a train of thought concerning a certain type of New Englander whose strength is spent. It was such people, he reflected, who still clung to the old soil whence the sturdier representatives of the stock had long since departed, destined to give way at last to the swarming Polack, the French Canadian, and the Italian. The thought was melancholy, and coloured to no little extent the remainder of his ride. This incident, which was only one of several, was afterward revived to win a permanent place in his memory when he came to know the girl as Lena Harpster; for her part in the drama of the immediate future was destined to be connected strangely with his own.

Seven o'clock found him again upon the tower, setting the telescope in order and preparing for his guests. He could scarcely expect them for an hour, but he walked restlessly about the enclosure of the parapet, breathing gratefully the cool night air. The lamp within his cabin shone dimly through the small windows upon his promenade. Beyond the battlements to the east, the evening star, which the Roman poet called Noctifer, began to bicker and brighten in the serene sky, and the last vestige of the sun's afterglow had now faded from the west. It was already as dark as a summer midnight. Small and continuous sounds came floating up from the city beyond. Immediately below he heard the occasional voices of students passing on the stone walk, and from the meadows on the west came the melancholy hoot of an owl.

Accustomed though he had been to lonely vigils, he was impressed by the juxtaposition of the minute and the infinitely vast, of the transient and the eternal. He stood looking for some time at the track of the Milky Way, till his gaze plunged into one of those abysms of blackness where no star shines, and the ghastliness of the distance suggested flooded in upon him. This lost and shivering sensation, when the world itself seems to shrink away and send the watcher spinning into the void, is vouchsafed to the astronomer only at rare moments, and from it an escape is offered by exact and intricate calculations. Even figures that climb into the millions, incomprehensible as they may be, offer some consolation to microscopic man; but when this consolation is withdrawn, as it was withdrawn from Leigh for the moment, he stands, as it were, annihilated by immensity.

Lost in this mood, the voice of Emmet came to his ears with a shock, a mere succession of sounds with scarce a meaning.

"Hello, professor! Are you up here star-gazing? I saw the door open at the foot of the stairs, and followed my nose till I found you, though it's a wonder I did n't break it, for my matches gave out two flights below."

The incongruity of this interruption was almost as great as a shout of laughter at a funeral, and Leigh experienced a reaction akin to hilarity.

"I 'm glad to see you," he returned, "for I had rather given you up till after the election."

"I just dropped in for a few minutes' chat," his visitor explained. "There's something doing later. It's funny that I have n't been up to the Hall once in the last ten years, and now I 've come twice in a week. When I was a kid, I used to hang around the edge of the campus, over there by the bishop's statue, and listen to the band on Commencement Day. Sometimes I used to crawl in under the fence to baseball games, too. St. George's put up a gilt-edged article of ball in those days."

"I remember hearing that they had a star year, when they beat everything in sight."

Emmet remembered the year in question, and the very names of the chief players, who were enshrined in his mind as only an athletic hero can be enshrined in the imagination of the normal boy. As he chatted on about his early impressions of the Hall, his listener became aware that he regarded their first interview as the doorway of a friendship into which he had now entered. A knowledge of this fact smote Leigh with some compunction, for he had been so much absorbed in his own ulterior purpose as to regard this man in the light of a means toward its accomplishment. Now Emmet stood before him again, haying taken him at his word, innocent of his original position as a pawn in another's game. He was not one who deserved to be so regarded, and Leigh felt this, though a greater interest had hitherto interfered with his appreciation. There was an element of discovery in this second meeting that was not unwelcome. Emmet's implied acceptance of his friendship suddenly added a new interest to his life, and served to enrich for him the city of Warwick, which until now had appeared a somewhat nebulous place, where only one spot glowed with warmth and light.

"Come into my shanty here," he said heartily. "I want to show you something I think will interest you. Have you ever looked at the stars?"

"On the street corner, at ten cents a look," Emmet answered.

"Then this will be something of a revelation to you. Miss Wycliffe is going to bring up a party to-night to use the telescope, but it's early yet."

The other made no comment upon this statement, and the reason of his silence remained obscure; whether it were due to indifference, or to a fear of disclosing a cherished emotion. It seemed more likely that the latter was the true explanation, and Leigh already knew his visitor well enough to be prepared for sudden streaks of reticence or secretiveness. The fact that he had discouraged his previous advances on the subject of Miss Wycliffe was enough to explain this present silence, but he felt that Emmet was acutely conscious of her impending arrival. He could not help wondering also whether he would linger deliberately until she should come. Speculating thus, he sat down in the chair and trained the telescope upon Saturn.

"There," he said, rising. "What do you make of that?"

"I see a star," Emmet answered after a while, "with a ring of mist around it—two rings."

"There are four, at least," said Leigh; "but the inner and intermediate rings are dark. A better instrument would show a greenish hue. There are eight satellites besides. You can imagine what sort of moonlit nights they have in Saturn, supposing that any one lives there to enjoy them."

Emmet drew a deep breath of wonder, and it was evident that his unimaginative mind was struggling with new conceptions. There was a gleam of humour in his eyes which contrasted oddly with the suggestion of awe in his voice, as he looked up and answered: "It must be a great place for lovers, professor. And how far away might it be?"

"Let me see—something over eight hundred and eighty millions of miles from the sun. Its distance from us depends"—

"Never mind," Emmet put in. "A few million miles more or less don't bother me any. It makes things down here seem rather small, does n't it? Politics, for example."

"It has the effect of readjusting our perspective a little," Leigh admitted. "I wanted to show you that planet at this time, because it is now at its best. If you waited another seven or eight years, you would see it only as a ball, for the rings would then be edgewise to the plane of your vision. Twice in about thirty years the rings seem to disappear, and twice they fan out to their largest extent. You 'll never see them broader than now."

Without a word Emmet turned back to the telescope.

"You can imagine," Leigh continued, sure of his listener's interest, "how that change puzzled the earlier astronomers. They thought that Saturn was merely a central ball with two handles, like the handles of a soup tureen; and when Galileo watched them grow thinner and thinner and at last disappear, he wondered whether Saturn had devoured his own children, as he expressed it. It was n't until fifty years later that a Dutchman named Huygens discovered the real cause of the variation. You don't mind a few excerpts from my lectures? But wait a minute; let me show you something else."

It was long after eight o'clock, so imperceptibly did the time slip away, when they emerged from the cabin, and Emmet prepared to go. Leigh looked at his watch, and realised with a quickening of his pulses that the visit so eagerly anticipated must be imminent, that Miss Wycliffe might even now be coming up the stairs. What if she had come, and, failing to find him below to guide her, had gone away offended? At the thought, he rushed back into the cabin and lighted the lantern which he used for his transits up and down the tower. When he came out again, he found that Emmet, instead of going, had drifted over to the western parapet, where he stood looking through an embrasure, as if the later engagement of which he had spoken were his last concern.

"My other visitors will be coming soon," Leigh explained, "and I must go to light them up the stairs."

He thought of the probable composition of the party, and reflected that it would simplify the situation if Emmet should go before their arrival. But his visitor failed to accept his implied suggestion. Was he dazed by the immensities into which he had looked, or did he form a sullen resolve to remain and meet that society against which he had so bitterly inveighed? Leigh knew that he could count on Miss Wycliffe's friendliness and upon her tact in meeting a situation, but he guessed that, if her companions were of like mind with the bishop, his present guest might be made to feel that he was an intruder.

"Just look at that car over in the valley," Emmet called, without turning. "It crawls through the darkness like an illuminated centipede."

Leigh was struck by the comparison, and in spite of his impatience, he went over and glanced through another depression in the wall. At the moment of turning away he was arrested by the distant panting of a motor-car far down the boulevard that skirted the cliff. Instinctively he waited to see it pass, as one waits for the passing of a train. Turning his eyes in the direction of the sound, which ascended with startling distinctness through the night air, he presently saw a gleam shoot above the hill; and now the great touring-car came on at breakneck pace, searching the dusty highway a hundred yards in advance with a clean pencil-shaft of light.

He was far from suspecting that he was watching the arrival of his visitors. It was not among his anticipations that Miss Wycliffe might come swooping down upon the college in this fashion, and moreover the machine was speeding from a direction directly opposite to that in which she lived. In fact, it was headed for the city from the open country beyond. His astonishment was great, therefore, when the car came to a sudden stop at the base of the tower, and the occupants fairly tumbled out in a gale of merriment and talk. In the babel of sounds Miss Wycliffe's voice detached itself, by its peculiar quality rather than by its power, causing his heart to vibrate as a string trembles to the touch.

"Mr. Cobbens," she cried gaily, "I believe you were bent on breaking our necks!"

"I 'm for walking home," came a man's voice.

There were no students' rooms directly over them, but to the north and south windows were flung open and heads peered curiously forth.

"Hush!" said another of the party. "Don't wake up the children."

This sally was greeted with another burst of mirth, and then the star-gazers filed through a small postern door in the walled-up arch that was one day to be opened wide for the passage of a road. Leigh took up his lantern, only to find that in his haste he had unwittingly turned out the flame. A puff of wind extinguished his match, and he was obliged to reenter the cabin for shelter from the draught. Owing to this delay, he had scarcely begun to descend before he heard the voices of his guests growing louder in their progress from below.

About midway he saw them coming across the platform immediately below him, the bishop's daughter in the lead with a tall wax candle in her hand. As she ascended the stairs, the light of the candle gave her uplifted face the effect of a delicate cameo set in a frame of radiating gold. Her lips were parted, her breath came fast, and her eyes were wondrous in their dark brilliancy. Rarely beautiful as the picture was, Leigh received no impression of a "missioned spirit rising unawares," for as her wrap slipped down from her shoulders, she suggested rather that goddess who floated into the light one April day on the crest of a wave. Apparently she was in a most gracious mood, and not inclined to hold him to account. She did not wait to learn the reason of his detention above.

"Don't apologise, please," she panted, "for we got along capitally. Dr. Cardington gave me this candle, but declined to come with us. I thought he quite resented our intrusion, and was anxious to pass us up without delay." Then, turning to her companions with whimsical imperiousness, "Stand in a row, the whole class, till I introduce you to your new instructor."

The dimness of the light and Leigh's perturbation of mind at the thought of Emmet made his impression of the personnel of the party so vague that he might have passed most of them the following day without recognition. They had evidently dined well, and were finishing a gay evening with a flying visit to the college observatory. Only the personality of Cobbens was salient in the group, and would have been so even if Leigh's curiosity concerning the man had not been previously aroused.

"We're too frivolous for Cardington," he said, taking off his cap and mopping his brow. "I'm glad to meet you, sir. This is a spooky place, the ideal place for a man to hang himself in. I spent four years in the Hall and never came up here before. I knew and loved your predecessor, as all the fellows did. The old gentleman may not have been well up in astronomy,—I don't know anything about that,—but he was well up in the psychology of boys. He left a big place behind him, which we 're not likely to see filled in a hurry."

During this address he continued to shake Leigh's hand with an apparent cordiality that contrasted strongly with his final innuendo, but now their hands fell apart with mutual repulsion. Leigh had been prejudiced against the lawyer beforehand, and his first remarks at their introduction contained a grisly jest and an implied slight. But these things only paved the way to the final cause of distrust—the fashion of the man himself. He was unprepossessing in every line. His thin, pale face widened rapidly, like a top, to a broad and shining pate, which looked not so much bald as half naked below its sparse covering of reddish hair. His eyes were glimmering and of an indeterminate colour. Yet his voice was not unattractive in its persuasive intonation, and his manner was friendly almost to the verge of effusiveness. Whatever might be his demerits from a physical point of view, he lacked the general air of inconsequence that characterised most of his companions. He conveyed unmistakably the assurance of a certain malign power. One felt that his normal method of locomotion was the mole's, but that sooner or later he would thrust his head above the soil at the top of the hill.

As they emerged upon the roof, they came face to face with Emmet.

"Hello!" Cobbens cried, as the two men shook hands. "Are you taking a course in astronomy too?"

"Yes," replied the other, "and I'm just about going."

Their mutual cordiality of manner, somewhat in excess of the requirements of conventional courtesy, struck Leigh with a sense of the ridiculous. He had not anticipated a scene, but he had looked for some coldness and restraint. The other visitors, with a curious glance in passing, spread out over the roof or entered the cabin, but the bishop's daughter remained behind. She shifted the candle to her left hand, and offered her right to her protege with charming courtesy.

"Has Mr. Leigh been casting your horoscope?" she asked, smiling. "I hope he found your star in the ascendant."

Leigh did not wonder that Emmet appeared dazzled, or that his bold eyes were a shade less bold in their embarrassed admiration.

"Thank you, Miss Wycliffe—I think we shall win."

"I hope so," she returned, with a momentary side-long look at Cobbens. The lawyer's eyes were upon her, and as Leigh caught their hungry glimmer, he remembered with a sharp contraction of the heart that he was a widower, and that sometimes the most hideous men possess a compelling fascination for women of great beauty.

"Oh, astrology is out of date," Cobbens broke in, with an easy chuckle. "Isn't it, professor?"

"Yes," Leigh retorted, "but I believe politics is not."

The laughter with which this remark was greeted indicated the real tension that underlay all this appearance of good feeling.

"Politics is never out of date," Emmet declared, with grim emphasis, "as we mean to show you soon."

"Politics is like poker," Cobbens commented sententiously. "Just now we 're raising the ante, but presently there 'll be a show down, and may the best hand win."

"We ask nothing better," Emmet assured him, moving toward the stairs. "Good-night. I must be off."

"Wait a moment!" Miss Wycliffe called after him. "Here—take this candle to light your way, and may good luck go with it."

Emmet had already begun to descend the stairs when her voice arrested him. He turned as she approached, and because of his lower position her form hid him entirely from the view of the two men she had just left. Leigh saw the fur edge of her wrap standing out like a mist against the flaring light of the candle as she stooped to hand it down, and he thought she lingered longer than was absolutely necessary, as if to speak some parting words of encouragement. The impression that further words had passed between them was so disquieting, in view of his suspicion of Emmet's audacity, that he was fain to believe himself mistaken. It seemed that Cobbens also had lost nothing of this incident, for when she returned, he regarded her with as much disapproval as he dared to show.

"You 'll turn the poor beggar's head, Miss Wycliffe," he said. "It's a mistaken kindness. His fall will be all the greater for your whim."

"Sometimes beggars get on horseback," she retorted coolly, "and then they keep on riding."

Leigh's knowledge of the lawyer's career enabled him to appreciate the sharpness of this remark, but Cobbens was more adroit than he could have thought possible in the face of such a taunt.

"Well, when that poor beggar tries to mount the political horse, he 'll get thrown so hard that he 'll never try it again."

Miss Wycliffe vouchsafed no reply, but turned toward the cabin, and they followed her in silence. During the subsequent session about the telescope, Leigh was not surprised to find that she domineered over her friends, or that they accepted her tyranny without question. In her self-appointed office of the instructor's assistant, she gave this one or that the chair, until the young astronomer thought it high time to protest.

"I insist upon your taking a look yourself," he said. "I have something of peculiar interest reserved for you." And he trained the instrument upon Castor, in the constellation of the Twins. She took the chair and looked for a tantalising length of time in silence, while with one hand she waved off the questions and impatience of the others. He bent over her, almost oblivious of their presence. "It's a double star, you see. What do you think of it?"

"Beautiful!" she answered. "I wondered why I was seeing double. Tell us about it."

"They are two suns in one sphere, swinging on through space side by side. Two centuries of calculations have brought out the fact that it takes forty-four years for the light of Castor to reach us, and that a thousand years are consumed in one circuit of its orbit."

"I must admit," she said, looking up at him with a mysterious splendour in her eyes, in which there yet lurked a suspicion of humour, "that a thousand years gives me a shiver."

Up to this time the moral atmosphere of the room had by no means attained the level reached by Leigh and Emmet alone, not only because of the restless presence of Cobbens, which refused to harmonise with the idea of sublimity, but also because, in any such gathering, the tendency is downward toward the plane of the most frivolous and common-place person present. The jest about the class, intermittently revived, had reduced the stars to pretty baubles or, at most, to the fairy lamps of fanciful verse, in spite of figures of distance that grew more and more stupendous. But now a sudden hush fell upon them; it might have been a tardy appreciation, or the mere emotional reaction from little talk. For the moment Leigh forgot that they were not alone, and almost unconsciously he spoke the thought that had flashed from her eyes to his: "A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that it is past as a watch in the night."

The situation had grown suddenly and unexpectedly dramatic. It was as if a troupe of revellers had torn aside a curtain in their mad rush, and had come face to face with the silence and blackness of an abyss. Miss Wycliffe rose from the chair as if starting back from such a vision, and though her tone, when she spoke, was light, it was apparently so by design.

"If you insist upon quoting from the Burial Service, Mr. Leigh, I shall take it as a hint to go home at once."

"And it's time we did," Cobbens put in. "We 're much obliged to you, sir. We 've had a charming time, and owe you a vote of thanks."

When Leigh had lighted them downstairs, he ascended once more to his cabin, tortured by an acute self-consciousness. The evening had been far from satisfactory; never had the difference between anticipation and realisation been more impressively illustrated. In his afternoon dreams he had not considered Miss Wycliffe's companions, except as shadows, and it was they who had disturbed what would otherwise have been a charmed atmosphere. His quotation would have been natural had he been alone with the woman he loved, but in that company it seemed inept and melodramatic, deserving the rebuke she so easily administered. In his humiliation he thought that he must have appeared extremely youthful in her eyes, one who could not conceal his emotions before the gaze of the curious and shallow. Could he have overheard the conversation which took place between Cobbens and Miss Wycliffe on their way home, his distress would have been in no way lightened.

The lawyer allowed the machine to run more slowly, that its jar and noise might not drown his voice.

"Your friend with the comet-coloured hair," he began, "will never fit into the life of St. George's Hall. I can see he has n't the true Hall traditions or spirit."

She was apparently more interested in his views than inclined to express her own. If she reflected at all upon the speaker's lack of that physical distinction which he selected in Leigh for the exercise of his wit, and if she derived some enjoyment from an understanding of his resentment, she kept it to herself.

"What makes you think so?" she asked serenely. "What was he doing with that Tom Emmet up there?" he demanded, by way of answer. "In my day, the professors of the Hall were more select in the company they kept."

"Times have changed since then," she commented, "and the world has grown democratic."

He suspected her mood of mockery, but his intelligence could not hold his spleen in check.

"Yes," he went on malevolently, "I suppose it has; and soon we shall have a lot of muckers in the college instead of the gentlemen that used to go there in my day. So that's the prize poor old Renshaw drew from the Western grab-bag! It's too bad your father was away."

"Is n't it?" she assented. "But then, you know, he is here on a year's appointment, and perhaps he will leave in the spring."

"I can't understand," he resumed, "how he came to know Tom Emmet, of all men, in this short time, and how he happened to have him up there on the tower."

As she seemed unable to throw any light upon this mystery, he was left to grapple with it alone.



CHAPTER VIII

"WHAT MAKES HER IN THE WOOD SO LATE?"

The City Hall in Warwick was a three-storied brick building of dignified Colonial style, built during Washington's first administration. The foundations had settled somewhat, as more than one crack, zig-zagging upward from window to window, bore witness; and many an iron clamp had stained the walls, suggesting to the sentimental mind that the old building was weeping rusty tears over the degeneracy of the times. However, the Hall was only in the first stages of an old age that might be described as green, for the huge beams were sound to the core, and the figure of a Roman lady still stood firmly upon the cupola, extending with one chubby arm the impartial scales of Justice.

About a block to the south, and across the street, surrounded by rows of crumbling gravestones carved with quaint epitaphs and heads of ghastly cherubs, stood the First Church. Any stranger, carried hither in a magic trunk and asked to name that corner of the world in which he found himself, would have glanced but once at the four white pillars of the First Church and once at the venerable City Hall, before answering that he was in the heart of New England. No one could fail to identify the architecture of these two characteristic edifices, or of the shops whose roofs slanted toward the street; no one could mistake the speech and countenance of many a passer-by. Evidences of modernity, buildings that might have been anywhere else, were not lacking; but these huge piles of iron and stone served only to bring into sharper contrast the remnants of an earlier civilisation.

As one looked up and down the curving street, the thing that immediately attracted his attention was a succession of church steeples or cupolas that broke the roof-lines at almost regular intervals, and the fashion of these structures left no doubt in the mind that Warwick, in spite of foreign immigration, was still a stronghold of Puritanism. All suggestion of Romish or Episcopalian tradition was scrupulously avoided, even to the omission of the cross and the substitution of a weather-vane or gamecock. Only one church told a different story. At some distance north of the City Hall a gothic edifice in brown stone, with a beautiful square tower of elaborate design, gave a touch of colour and richness to a vista otherwise somewhat cold and bare. This was St. George's Church, whose vestry, in the days when it required some degree of heroism to be an Episcopalian in that uncongenial atmosphere, had founded St. George's Hall. The present edifice, though numbering seventy-five years of life, was young compared with the First Church; and the lapse of time had not served to alter their respective positions in the community. In Warwick the Episcopalians were still a small minority; they were still the dissenters of this dissenting commonwealth.

Around the City Hall, which a pious care had preserved in spite of its present inadequacy, circled an almost unbroken procession of trolley-cars; for this point was the very centre of the web of tracks whose various termini were pegged out here and there in the neighbouring towns. It might be added that this spot was enshrined in the heart of every loyal citizen of Warwick as the true umbilicus of the visible universe.

In the eyes of Llewellyn Leigh, however, the place had no such mystic significance. On the afternoon following the visit of Miss Wycliffe to the tower, he had walked hither from the college, down the long, winding street on whose well-worn pavements the yellowing leaves of the elms threw a sheen like gold. He had noted many a colonial house built close to the sidewalk in the original New England fashion; he had seen glimpses of deep back gardens; but his appreciative attitude of the previous afternoon was gone, giving way to mild melancholy, such a mood as is sometimes induced by the perusal of an old romance dear to the youth of one's grandparents. The experience of the previous night had some hand in this disillusion. Some of the dissatisfaction with which it had left him still hung about his spirit, and drove him on in a vague search for diversion. He stood in front of the City Hall and watched the open cars go by, then took one, almost at random, that bore the label of Evergreen Park. As soon as he had swung himself aboard, he found that he was sitting beside Emmet, and the meeting was not altogether welcome in his present self-absorption. Emmet also seemed somewhat subdued as he asked him his destination, but he suspected that this impression might be merely a reflection of himself.

"I 'm going wherever this car goes," he answered. "Evergreen Park, is n't it? I 'm gradually exploring the surrounding country, and one direction will do as well as another. But where are you bound for?"

"Politics," Emmet said briefly. Whether he had left the tower the previous evening with a sore heart and was inclined to identify his new friend with his old enemy, or whether he was merely occupied with his own thoughts, Leigh now felt that his manner really exhibited some constraint. He was a man of keen intuitions, and divined a sensitiveness on his companion's part in regard to the rather inglorious figure he had cut, in spite of Miss Wycliffe's openly expressed interest. After all, might not this interest of hers savour of ostentatious patronage? At this thought he experienced a kind of fellow-feeling for the candidate, a change of emotion which his manner was quick to register. His interest in politics was the academic interest of the typical Mugwump he had confessed himself to be, and too much confined to an occasional vote of protest. He had never attended a primary meeting in his life, always having been too busy with his own career to realise this duty, and too nomadic in his habits to acquire a personal interest in local affairs. To him politics was the pastime of the rich, who could afford it, or the business of the poor, who used it as a means of support. The very word, as Emmet used it, conveyed an impression to his mind like that which Borrow received when his gipsy friends mentioned the mysterious "business of Egypt." He made a comment that drew his companion on to speak of Cobbens with his former bitterness, though in a smothered tone, as if he feared some chance listener in the car that was now filling rapidly.

"But you'll find nothing doing in the park," Emmet said presently, with an abrupt change of subject. "The season has just closed, and there is n't a person on the place."

"So much the better," Leigh answered. "I 'm not in the mood for merry-go-rounds and picnickers."

The seat became crowded to the point of discomfort, and Emmet, with a significant look, went back to join the conductor on the platform. Leigh interpreted the look to mean that some of the political business on which he was bent lay with this man, and their earnest conversation confirmed his impression. Left alone, he took Emmet's place at the end of the seat and began to watch the passing scene. The car swung down a steep street and crossed a long bridge over the river, from which he had a view of a wide blue basin, where a score of little yachts lay motionless as floating gulls. In the other direction several sand-bars showed brown, ribbed backs, sparsely covered with coarse grass, and Leigh wished that he could find himself dropped upon one of them, that he might have the pleasure of wading ashore. The fancy put him in a better frame of mind, and the afternoon began to brighten. In front of him the open country beckoned, and before committing himself to it, he turned for a farewell look at Warwick. The city stood upon the high river wall, roof above roof shimmering in the hazy light, every line of chimney, spire, and tower softened by the distance, like a blurred etching against a pale blue background.

The country was similar to that through which he had passed the day before, only now the quality of the air was a little more drowsy, the quietude more absolute, and he awoke to the fact that the Indian Summer had begun. The car had gone about four miles before Emmet returned, and so absorbed had Leigh become that his reappearance was a surprise. They were now at the top of a long hill, from the summit of which the country fell away till it rose again far off in dark purple ridges of low mountains.

"I am reminded of California by that sky-line," Leigh remarked. "Only out there you see no patches of gorgeous foliage like those yonder. The autumn comes on by imperceptible gradations. The first thing you know, the leaves have shrivelled and gone."

"The park lies down there in the valley," Emmet said, on whom the comparison had evidently made no impression. "There's nothing to see, though, at this time of year. Why don't you go on to Pitkinton and visit the silk mills?"

"Because I 'm determined to explore the park," Leigh answered. He was not one to be swerved from his purpose by another's persistence; in fact, any effort in such a direction usually had an opposite effect. "I have no desire to see a lot of men working over machinery to-day who ought to be out enjoying the Indian Summer," he explained. "I'll reserve the mills for some other time."

The car came to a stop at a switch before a rustic gate, and they got off together. It occurred to Leigh that possibly he had been a little short with Emmet, somewhat unsympathetic with his practical and industrial interests. If this were so, it was merely because he realised the uselessness of explaining the peculiar intoxication of his mood, for he suspected that the other would regard such emotions as fit only for women and poets. "You might come for a walk with me," he suggested. "The exercise would do you good."

Emmet hesitated, as if he considered the proposition seriously, looking down the track at the approaching car for which their own was waiting. "No," he said slowly. "I must be getting back to town, and there's one of the boys on this car that I want to see."

"Some other time, then," said Leigh. "There are n't any bandits in these woods, are there?"

"You 'd better keep your gun handy," Emmet answered. "Well, take care of yourself."

Leigh had by this time reached the wicket gate, where he turned a moment to catch Emmet's friendly wave of the hand. A few steps more, and the woods enclosed him like a wall. He heard the diminishing buzz of the returning car with a sense of relief and escape, for he was pleased that his invitation had not been accepted. In his mind lingered a feeling that he and Emmet had not been able to meet this afternoon quite as before, but the feeling vanished with the disappearance of the car, leaving him merely glad of the solitude. Soon he came to a spring, a placid basin of water canopied by an artificial grotto of rock, and kneeling down he gazed intently at his own reflection. But no thought of Narcissus, or of Horace's fountain of Bandusia, intervened to substitute literary memories for the reality of sensation; he was too genuine a lover of nature to interpret it in the terms of letters.

Down at the bottom of the pool the water welled up in slow puffs, as if the ground were panting, stirring dead sticks and withered leaves, and presently, in the spokes of light that radiated from the reflection of his head, he descried a frog resting motionless below him. He disturbed the water, so transparent that he could not tell when his fingers would enter it, and the frog was gone like a grey streak, leaving little swirls like dust where its feet had touched the bottom in its flight. The only thought that floated through his mind as he knelt there was one concerning the infinitely small in nature. The place, he knew, was swarming with unseen life, creatures compared with which the frog was a devouring monster of colossal proportions; and he reflected that the immeasurable spaces of the sky were not more wonderful than they.

Having taken a deep drink, he continued on his way, noting that here beneath the trees the afternoon seemed several hours advanced beyond the time of the sunny open, for the shadows were like twilight. Below the path, crossed and recrossed by rustic bridges, ran a small rivulet. The gurgling of its miniature falls, like the sound of water coming from the neck of a jug, the occasional cawing of a crow, and the snapping of twigs beneath his feet were the only interruptions to the silence. Here was a sudden hushed restfulness, as grateful as the draught of water he had drunk at the spring.

The rivulet ended in a broader stream, on whose bank he found a long, low boat-house already locked and abandoned. A wooden bridge ran across to the opposite shore, where a large dancing-pavilion stood, waiting for the snow to follow the drifting leaves through the open windows. A path which skirted this larger stream to the left promised more seclusion than the way across the bridge and decided his choice. On the bosom of the water were scattered the wrecks of what had recently been a beautiful bed of Egyptian lotos. Here, where all had been glistening greenness with splashes of yellow blossoms, attenuated stalks lifted what looked like crumpled fragments of brown paper, which quivered in a breeze too light to move the surface of the stream. Here alone the fingers of the frost had left a blight, like that of flames, and had denied to their destructive work the glamour of a funeral pall, dealing death without pomp or circumstance.

The trees crept down and almost thrust him at times into the water which lay at his feet, black from the vegetation in its bed and reflecting on its brimming surface bright patches of colour from the foliage on the opposite shore. Here and there a stricken tree was duplicated by a long white image that seemed to point like a finger to the depths below. Apparently there was no current, and this lack of motion, combined with the blackness of the water and the sombreness of the woods, produced an effect in striking contrast with the blue and sunny river he had first crossed, its floating boats and scattered sand-bars.

At length the trail took a sudden turn into the woods. The oaks and elms gave way to a grove of pines, and the tangled jungle of undergrowth was replaced by a slippery carpet of brown needles. The path climbed upward until it ended in a comparatively open space, and there, under the branches of a pine, her white hands clasped upon her knees, he saw a woman sitting alone. If a hamadryad had suddenly thrust her head around the bole of a tree and looked him full in the face, he would not have been more astonished, so absolute was his sense of utter loneliness; but when he saw that the figure was that of Miss Wycliffe, he stood like one transfixed and deprived of the power of speech. This was like a wild freak of his fancy, and he could scarcely believe the vision real. The surprise appeared to be entirely on his side, for she smiled as if the meeting were a matter of course, or one of appointment. Undoubtedly she had been listening to his approach for some time, and had seen him first.

"Well, Mr. Leigh," she called, "I hope I did n't frighten you. You started as if you had seen a ghost."

He came forward, laughing. "So you are one of the bandits Emmet told me of! He said the woods were full of them."

"Emmet," she repeated. "Did you come out with him? I did n't know he was on this line."

"He is n't on any line at present. He has thrown up his job entirely for politics. That seemed to be what he came out for. I left him on the platform waiting for the down car, which he said was run by 'one of the boys' whom he wanted to see." After a slight hesitation he added: "I tried to persuade him to come with me, but I 'm glad now he did n't."

The frank friendliness of her gaze betrayed no acceptance of his meaning. "And how did our experiment come out?" she asked. "I inferred from his presence with you last night that you had struck up some sort of a friendship. I thought you would." She motioned him to be seated with her characteristic suggestion of imperiousness. "Sit down, do, and tell me all about it. You 've come just in time for my little picnic, though I 'm afraid the friend I expected has failed me. You 'll get nothing to eat, however, but this basket of Concord grapes which I picked up on the way." And she thrust it forward with a smile of invitation.

He threw himself down at her feet, and having selected a cluster of the purple fruit, he held it up admiringly to the light.

"I did n't see any one on the car except the usual suburbanites," he remarked. "But would n't you be afraid out here all alone, with no men to protect you?" He wondered who the friend might be, but was too much pleased with his own good fortune to give it more than a passing thought.

"I believe we ought to be," she confessed, "but we 're not. The truth is, we like to get far away from civilisation and exchange confidences. Warwick is a great whispering-gallery, full of tale-bearing bats that peep and mutter."

He lifted his head and listened. "Did you get that faint lift of the breeze in the pines just then? Now it's gone; but it was just like the distant sound of the surf. If my eyes were shut, I should think myself by the shore."

"Oh, I 've been listening to nothing else for the last half hour," she returned, "and I much prefer the sound of a human voice. Too much of nature frightens me. You see I have no soul."

"You 've too much soul, perhaps," he amended. "If you had less, you would be impervious to such suggestions. But I know what you mean. However, we were talking about our friend Emmet, and your description of Warwick reminded me of his animadversions on the place. But let me go back to the beginning for a fair start, and tell you how I managed to get hold of him." He described the events of the morning following the dinner and the visit Emmet had paid him in the evening, putting in the personal detail with an instinctive knowledge of a woman's demand for such things. Her evident appreciation rewarded him. She had something to say of the captain who had helped him in his effort, and at many a point in their talk the congeniality of their minds became evident. "You know how Emmet feels about the college, and about colleges in general?" he asked.