“You’re right, Florio. You’re always right.” The old man nodded. Seldom had his wrinkled face appeared so tolerant, his eyes and voice so regretful and kindly. “I hate to lose you out of sight, boy, but--perhaps--” “Slip your cable!” laughed Tony. So Miles went with Habakkuk Belden to the High Woods. “Thought he’d knock under,” chuckled the teamster, as they slid jingling through the powdery snow. “Here, Mile, drive Danamite whilst I git a pipeful o’ Mundungo. Yes, sir, a turr’ble persuadin’ tongue I got, if a man can brag o’ gifts. The pen of a ready writer! But the Old Sir looks peeked, Mile. Standin’ so in the door, I saw a breath o’ feebleness go out again’ him. Well, stren’th don’t hitch up with years. G’ long there, Danger!” The road ran high and lonely over the ridges. Their eyes, dazzled with leagues of white glare, blurred with tears in the sweep of a freezing wind, gained power slowly to descry the milder gleam of the channel far beneath, and beyond this, the billowing of the Maine hills, softened by distance and the smoothing magic of the snow. Sometimes, dipping into a smothered hollow among firs, they suffered again a momentary blindness, in the obscurity of dark green and shadowed white; and again, yet once more dazed with wide brilliancy, climbed higher and farther from the river, up an immense and softly convex curve, toward the fugitive sky-line. Black evergreen tops, the distant relics of some grove, dotted the hill like ermine; or singly, and closer to hand, like feathered arrows that a giant might have shot straight downward. Rarely these, however; so free was the north wind, so shelterless and dry the snow, that by turns the sled groaned over frozen mud, and stuck fast in smoking drifts. As the two men pushed and tugged to aid the horse, or slapped their aching hands, or stamped and kicked the sled, they exchanged few words. The slow jangling of the bells traveled in the void, a stray mote of cheerful sound. To Miles, looking back down many a long slope, they chimed with vague but happy thoughts. He surveyed, in shining perspective from this eminence, not only his native valley, but the last fortnight of his life there. Ella was wrong, he had not moped; Tony was wrong, he had hardly considered their estrangement; here was the real truth: before that adventure in the fog, he had passed his days in a brown study, and after it, had been whirled into the glowing rout of life. A hundred dim things which had passed him by he now saw, heard, felt, and thrillingly understood. Two regrets lingered: he had not seen again either the man or the girl of Alward’s Cove; and from them he traveled farther at every shake of the bells. Yet all that was but temporary; and meanwhile, to his strange, new vision of the world, the simplest detail in this simple journey was a bit of exultation.