She was apparently more interested in his views than inclined to express her own. If she reflected at all upon the speaker's lack of that physical distinction which he selected in Leigh for the exercise of his wit, and if she derived some enjoyment from an understanding of his resentment, she kept it to herself. "What makes you think so?" she asked serenely. "What was he doing with that Tom Emmet up there?" he demanded, by way of answer. "In my day, the professors of the Hall were more select in the company they kept." "Times have changed since then," she commented, "and the world has grown democratic." He suspected her mood of mockery, but his intelligence could not hold his spleen in check. "Yes," he went on malevolently, "I suppose it has; and soon we shall have a lot of muckers in the college instead of the gentlemen that used to go there in my day. So that's the prize poor old Renshaw drew from the Western grab-bag! It's too bad your father was away." "Is n't it?" she assented. "But then, you know, he is here on a year's appointment, and perhaps he will leave in the spring." "I can't understand," he resumed, "how he came to know Tom Emmet, of all men, in this short time, and how he happened to have him up there on the tower." As she seemed unable to throw any light upon this mystery, he was left to grapple with it alone. CHAPTER VIII "WHAT MAKES HER IN THE WOOD SO LATE?" The City Hall in Warwick was a three-storied brick building of dignified Colonial style, built during Washington's first administration. The foundations had settled somewhat, as more than one crack, zig-zagging upward from window to window, bore witness; and many an iron clamp had stained the walls, suggesting to the sentimental mind that the old building was weeping rusty tears over the degeneracy of the times. However, the Hall was only in the first stages of an old age that might be described as green, for the huge beams were sound to the core, and the figure of a Roman lady still stood firmly upon the cupola, extending with one chubby arm the impartial scales of Justice. About a block to the south, and across the street, surrounded by rows of crumbling gravestones carved with quaint epitaphs and heads of ghastly cherubs, stood the First Church. Any stranger, carried hither in a magic trunk and asked to name that corner of the world in which he found himself, would have glanced but once at the four white pillars of the First Church and once at the venerable City Hall, before answering that he was in the heart of New England. No one could fail to identify the architecture of these two characteristic edifices, or of the shops whose roofs slanted toward the street; no one could mistake the speech and countenance of many a passer-by. Evidences of modernity, buildings that might have been anywhere else, were not lacking; but these huge piles of iron and stone served only to bring into sharper contrast the remnants of an earlier civilisation.