"But I am!"
"You'll find someone tugging at the other end one day."
Turning her palms up and down, she showed him her unshackled wrists. "There's nothing there."
"Well, lead on, then. Straight for the gap."
She went before him. To her the walk was a revelation of her capacity for happiness and when she went to bed that night, she could look back on the day and marvel at the ease with which she had talked about herself, what she wished to do, what she feared she would never do, telling him all without a thought of making any effect, impelled by her conviction of his sympathy, and her own need to speak. Only now, in the quiet of the bedroom, did she speculate on Alexander's judgment of her. She had walked with him for hours, she had been careless of his opinion because she trusted it, because she had so completely and immediately accepted him as friend that another conception of the relationship had seemed impossible, and she saw now that her feeling for him had been too sure and swift for any reflex action. She was less likely to pose to him even than to herself, and, pondering on that remarkable fact, she sat on the bed and drew off her stockings. After all her years of introspection and enjoyment of an audience, this new condition neared the miraculous, and it grew in significance as she sat, slowly unfastening her clothes. Why, it had all been as simple as picking a flower and putting it in her dress, but that Alexander was hardly comparable to a flower. What was he like? A hill, she thought, mirroring the clouds and growing light again with their passing.
She told no one of her meeting with him, and she did not see him again.
To Alexander the memory of that day was a tempting and detested scourge. He was twenty-seven, and the two women who were his friends had held him in their laps. Young women were strangers even to his thoughts, and at Theresa's invasion of his home he had left it, only to have her gold and purple thrust into his hands. And how tightly he had held them all that day! How he had watched her going before him, turning, now and then, to speak! The allurement of her poised body had been strong for him: she had come upon him out of the very earth, with the sun on her hair, and his unguarded senses had greeted her in spite of the dictates of his mind, and, powerful against all warnings, he felt the stirring of the life that had been so long asleep.
But it was when they rested in the promised place that he felt the kinship of her spirit, and did his best not to acknowledge it, and yielded before the vision of her enraptured face. He had taken her to a tower of grey rocks, whence she could look forth as from a window on fold after fold of hills: blue and purple they were, green and grey, colours so intermixed and blended that the eye could hardly part them, and as she gazed out on these serene and solid waves of earth and the deep troughs dividing them, or looked straight below her at the narrow valley streaked with the cotton threads that were streams, up at the sky and the bird that hung there, and down to the ferns in the crannies of the rocks, he knew she loved the hills with a passion younger than his own, but as strong. He knew it through his heart and mind, and in the same instant, he was jealous that she should love them, and that they should be loved by her.
Separated from her by a few yards, he sat on a rock, smoking his pipe and saying nothing, nor did she show any wish to speak. Sometimes he turned to look at her, and always he saw his own emotions on her face. She sat very still, leaning a little forward: the fingers of her clasped hands were interlaced, except when she brushed aside the ruffled hair that strayed into her eyes: her cheeks were pale, but about her there was a subdued light like that in the sky long after the sun has dropped away.
Presently she rose and wandered off, and, in fear lest she should be lost, he followed and found her lying at full length, propping her chin with her hands and digging little graves for her toes. Smiling, but looking at him with solemn eyes, she released one hand and patted the ground beside her in invitation, and thus they lay until her shiver warned him that the air was cold.