As he looked at Emmet's sturdy figure plunging on before them, now lost in shadow, now passing through a bar of light that shone from a student's window, he wondered at the man's surrender of one who was to him a treasure-house into which were gathered all the beauty and mystery and fascination of women. The future held much of uncertainty for him, but his love was safe. This final act of the drama, which was, after all, only the centrepiece of a trilogy, built on a drama acted before Leigh's entrance to the scene, and promising another in the future, was played more below the surface than above. Not one tenth of the things that might have been said was actually spoken; the greater part was unexpressed, perhaps unexpressible. But to the young astronomer, Nature herself, never wholly mute, was full of interpretative music. If the wind was ever a paean of victory, it was such to him as they emerged from the shelter of the Hall and received the full force of its robust and joyful blast; if the familiar stars ever sang in their courses, they sang to him now. From time to time his hand met that of the woman he loved in a clinging touch, as he turned to help her through a drift that had risen since she passed that way, and this progress seemed to his warm imagination an allegory of their future life together. They neared the end of the maple walk, and the mayor's dark figure became partially obscured by the bulk of his waiting sleigh. The next moment he was standing upright within it, arranging the blanket about him, seeming larger than human against the whiteness beyond. He sank into his seat and gathered up the reins. They heard him speak to his horse in his confidential way; there was a cheerful burst of silvery bells, and the sleigh began to move rapidly down the hill. As Leigh watched the vanishing figure, his heart was smitten by a keen regret, for he felt that a man of heroic quality, known only when lost, was passing out of his life forever.