Accustomed though he had been to lonely vigils, he was impressed by the juxtaposition of the minute and the infinitely vast, of the transient and the eternal. He stood looking for some time at the track of the Milky Way, till his gaze plunged into one of those abysms of blackness where no star shines, and the ghastliness of the distance suggested flooded in upon him. This lost and shivering sensation, when the world itself seems to shrink away and send the watcher spinning into the void, is vouchsafed to the astronomer only at rare moments, and from it an escape is offered by exact and intricate calculations. Even figures that climb into the millions, incomprehensible as they may be, offer some consolation to microscopic man; but when this consolation is withdrawn, as it was withdrawn from Leigh for the moment, he stands, as it were, annihilated by immensity.
Lost in this mood, the voice of Emmet came to his ears with a shock, a mere succession of sounds with scarce a meaning.
"Hello, professor! Are you up here star-gazing? I saw the door open at the foot of the stairs, and followed my nose till I found you, though it's a wonder I did n't break it, for my matches gave out two flights below."
The incongruity of this interruption was almost as great as a shout of laughter at a funeral, and Leigh experienced a reaction akin to hilarity.
"I 'm glad to see you," he returned, "for I had rather given you up till after the election."
"I just dropped in for a few minutes' chat," his visitor explained. "There's something doing later. It's funny that I have n't been up to the Hall once in the last ten years, and now I 've come twice in a week. When I was a kid, I used to hang around the edge of the campus, over there by the bishop's statue, and listen to the band on Commencement Day. Sometimes I used to crawl in under the fence to baseball games, too. St. George's put up a gilt-edged article of ball in those days."
"I remember hearing that they had a star year, when they beat everything in sight."
Emmet remembered the year in question, and the very names of the chief players, who were enshrined in his mind as only an athletic hero can be enshrined in the imagination of the normal boy. As he chatted on about his early impressions of the Hall, his listener became aware that he regarded their first interview as the doorway of a friendship into which he had now entered. A knowledge of this fact smote Leigh with some compunction, for he had been so much absorbed in his own ulterior purpose as to regard this man in the light of a means toward its accomplishment. Now Emmet stood before him again, haying taken him at his word, innocent of his original position as a pawn in another's game. He was not one who deserved to be so regarded, and Leigh felt this, though a greater interest had hitherto interfered with his appreciation. There was an element of discovery in this second meeting that was not unwelcome. Emmet's implied acceptance of his friendship suddenly added a new interest to his life, and served to enrich for him the city of Warwick, which until now had appeared a somewhat nebulous place, where only one spot glowed with warmth and light.