self. But Lena,--so gentle and
acquiescent,--it was she who had taken the bit in her teeth and done
this astounding thing!

It would be a relief, he reflected, if he could make open confession
and begin life over again, or run away from the daily reminder of his
sin; but he must remain where he was, and steel himself to see Lena
unmoved, a man with an abiding shadow.

CHAPTER XXI

THE MAYOR FINDS HIMSELF AT LAST

It was between three and four o'clock in the afternoon of the same day,
and the sun still shone dazzlingly on the deep, unblemished snow. All
morning long, the janitors of the Hall had been toiling through the
drifts with their shovels, leaving a narrow pathway behind them from
the southern extremity of the building to the street at the end of the
maple walk. Now, their heads and shoulders had ceased to rise and fall
above the bleak expanse.

Instead, a solitary figure could be seen advancing in the direction of
the college, seeming from a distance to be that of a child, and
reminding one of Little Red Riding-Hood in the fairy tale. The height
of the side walls of snow aided the distance in producing this
illusion. Upon coming nearer, one would have seen the child gradually
assume the stature of a woman, and had he been a citizen of Warwick, he
would have recognised Felicity Wycliffe.

Although, as a general thing, women were not wont to pass that way,
except to attend the chapel services of a Sunday or some public
ceremony, the bishop's daughter was free of the grounds by peculiar
rights, which no one dreamed of questioning. A group of students,
meeting her halfway, leaped gallantly into the snow waist-deep to let
her pass, and did not presume to question her mission or destination.

The wind had already begun to sift the fine snow into the bottom of the
trench, increasing the difficulty of her progress, and forming
innumerable little rifts and scallops in the white dunes that swelled
upward toward the skyline like the sands of the sea. Suddenly she
heard the harsh cawing of a flock of crows that passed overhead,
wheeling westward. The sound caused her heart to vibrate with a memory
of that wonderful October afternoon when she had listened with Leigh to
the same notes beneath the pines, and she shaded her eyes against the
sun to watch the course of the flock across the wide basin of the
valley. The notes grew less and less, no longer streperous but
strangely musical, and finally were he