Nort could never remember exactly what he did next. He recalls rushing through shadowy roads, with the cool, sharp air of the night biting his hot face. He remembers standing somewhere on a hilltop and looking up at the wonderful blue bowl of the sky all lit with stars. He could remember talking aloud, but not what it was that he said, only that it came out of the vast tumult within him. From time to time he would see with incomparable vividness Anthy's face looking up at him, he would hear, actually _hear_, his own thick voice speaking; every minute detail of the moment, every sight, sound, odour, would pass before him in flashes of consciousness. He would live over the entire evening, as it seemed to him, in a moment of time. He did not know that the world could be so beautiful; he did not imagine that he himself was like that! At its height emotion seems endless and indestructible, but it is, in its very nature, brief and elusive--else men might die of it. Nort's mood began finally to quiet down, the impressions and memories of the night rushed less wildly through his mind. And suddenly--he said it came to him with a shock--he thought of the future. He stopped still in the road. He had been so intoxicated with the experiences he had just passed through that it had actually never occurred to him what they might mean; and according to Nort's temperament the new vision instantly swallowed up the old, and, as it was cooler and clearer, seemed even more wonderful. He remembered saying very deliberately and aloud: "I must work for Anthy all my life." It came to him as a very wonderful thing that he could do this! Why, he could do anything for her: he could slave and dig and die! He could be _great_ for her--and let no one else know how great he was! He could win a battle, he could command men, he could write the greatest book in the world, and no one should know it but Anthy! Oh, youth, youth! His mind again became inordinately active: the whole wonderful future opened before him. He began to plan a thousand things that he might do. He would imagine himself walking home with Anthy, just as he had done that night, thrilling with the thought of her at his side, and he would be telling her his plans, and always she would be looking up into his face just as she had been doing at that last moment! All these things seem long in the telling--and they lasted for ages in Nort's soul--but as a matter of fact they were brief enough in time. Fergus, stumbling along behind in the cold road, his hard-set spirit suffering dumbly, was only waiting the choice of a moment to lay his hand upon Nort's shoulder. And thus the two of them came, by no forethought, to the little hill just north of my farm, and I entered for a moment, all unconsciously, upon the comedy, or the tragedy, of that historic night.