Left alone, Lena tottered as if she would have fallen; then sank upon her knees and crept to the window. With trembling fingers she raised the sash and let in the cool night air upon her bare neck and shoulders. She let in also a fuller burst of music and cheering, and through her tears she saw the lights dancing wildly, like a procession of fallen stars. Somewhere in that stream of splendour and sound he sat in his carriage, proud and triumphant, and with no thought of her. In her own room Miss Wycliffe stood before her mirror, looking now at the white reflection of her face, and now at the recovered ring which she had tossed upon the bureau, while in her splendid eyes blazed the light of a great and implacable anger. For the man who was at that moment passing by in the street, who had taken her gift and bestowed it upon a servant, had been her husband for more than two years. CHAPTER XI AT THE OLD CONTINENTAL One snowy afternoon, shortly before Christmas, Mayor Emmet came out to his sleigh from the City Hall, drawing on his gloves with a sense of release from unaccustomed confinement. While others hurried along, shrinking into their coats as if they would withdraw as far as possible from the nipping cold, he strode slowly and breathed deep, showing a strong man's conscious enjoyment of Nature in one of her sterner moods. His manner displayed a consciousness of something else also, of the position he meant to grace. He was already beginning to appreciate the discomfiture of his enemies. They had thought to find him bewildered and inefficient, and had encountered instead a man whose conception of his rights and duties was just and adequate. Strange also to superficial thinkers was his dignity of bearing, to which the _elite_ of Warwick paid the compliment of their resentment. But that ease and precision of movement, that steady glance of the eye, had been transferred from the baseball field to become singularly effective in the mayor's office. It was now that his experience as a conductor also yielded its harvest, though few of those whose money he had formerly collected realised the valuable knowledge they had given him of human nature's more difficult side. They had unwittingly taught him to control his temper under trying circumstances, to hear much and say little, and now they wondered at the success of their teaching. Even his language was exasperatingly correct. They might claim that his speech for the joint debate had been written by another, but this would not explain the excellent quality of his ordinary conversation; and it never occurred to them to point to him with pride as a product of the public schools for which their city was justly famous.