he 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 advantag