There was no previous greeting, no inquiry or explanation, no dalliance with emotion. His first words were a command, her inevitable response was to obey. Now, as always, she threw the whole responsibility upon him. And Emmet felt equal to the burden. He was like a god, knowing good and evil. He meant to do good in the main, but just now it was his pleasure to deviate a little. To-morrow he would come back into the straight road and hold it to the end. This resolve gave him a peculiar exhilaration, a special license for the definite indulgence. The next moment she was nestling close to his side, borne swiftly along as in a dream to the music of the bells. Putting his left arm behind her shoulders, he drew the robe up across her face to ward off the whistling wind. For some time she was content to lie thus in silence, lost in a sense of his strong embrace and in a consciousness of the romance that had come to her so unexpectedly out of loneliness and despair. This was her own lover, come back to her again, but he had never come thus before; and she remembered with a thrill that he was now the mayor of Warwick, taking his pleasure in his own sleigh. She wondered whether he had admired her golf cape; she had no need to wonder what he thought of its wearer. As if to reassure her on this very point, he spoke aloud. "Lena, I had clean forgot you were so pretty." "What did you say, Tom?" she asked, thrusting her head above the robe to hear again the praise she feigned to miss. "I had forgotten," he repeated, "that you were so confoundedly pretty." "I should think you would have forgotten it," she retorted. "You gave yourself time enough to forget almost anything." This unexpected show of spirit invested her with new piquancy, and he laughed aloud. At that moment the sleigh emerged upon the brow of the hill and caught the full force of the wind. A violent gust filled her hood and threw it back upon her shoulders, disclosing, as by the touch of a magician's wand, the mass of soft curls blowing wildly about her little head, her flushed cheeks and shining eyes. She saw the wide, desolate sweep of the valley, dotted here and there with twinkling lights, the belt of crimson against the distant hills; and then she saw his eyes bending near her own, as if they would drink in the beauty of every line of her face and every curl. His head blotted out the western sky, and their lips met. The sleigh began to drop below the hill, faster and faster, and her pulses kept time to the jingling of the bells. Without premeditation she had struck a new note in their relationship. The resentment which she had scarcely acknowledged to herself had grown during the weeks of unmerited neglect, and its expression had given her an advantage, had filled him with strange pleasure. He would find it harder to stay away from her so long again. From now on she was armed with a new knowledge of her lover.