He felt with a sort of surprise that his limbs were trembling as he went, his breath was short; more than once he paused, with a reeling sense as if he should fall, and he beheld the summit line of demarkation where the dark woods touched the clear sky describe a long curve upward, and once more sink to its place. He had not known the physical exhaustion that ensues upon strong and long-continued mental excitement. Beyond the moment's impatient realization he gave it no heed. He was glad, glad beyond all power of analysis, expectant, breathless, his eyes continually fixed upon the star, unmindful whither his failing feet carried him. He passed without a thought the door of the store of the Lost Time mine, from which so lately he had escaped as it were with his life in his hand. He might have seen, if he had chosen, the twinkle of Cornelia Taft's fire through the chinking, as she nodded on the hearth and vainly waited for her father's return to supper. He heard naught,--no voice from the woods, no stir of leaf, no sigh of wind, no lapsing of the alien sheets of water, not even the full rush of the stream from the portal of the Lost Time mine, loud, sinister, seemingly charged with cavernous echoes from those hidden haunted recesses whence it came, wild, turbulent, with thrice its normal volume hurling out into the black night. Only once he paused. The unseen air and the invisible moisture were at their jugglery again, weaving from nothingness wondrous symmetries of scrolls tenuous to the eye, marvelous winged suggestions endowed with the faculty of flight and airy poise, graces of fabric, tissues, fold on fold of impalpable pearl-tinted consistencies; and now a floating film passed before the star, and again it shone out more splendid still, and anon dimly through the gathering haze, and so was lost to sight.