At first he had lashed himself with scorn, remembering his infatuation for the woman he had married. He felt something of the indignant astonishment of the small boy who imagines himself catching a second attack of measles, before he discovers it is scarlet fever. But it took him only a brief time to realise that the passion inspired by Ora Blake was so much deeper and more various than the blind subservience to Nature that had driven him to Ida (who had not the least idea of being a tool of Nature herself) that it was far more dangerous than the first inevitable attack of youthful madness could ever be. It humiliated his pride to have been the mere victim of the race, the rudimentary male swept into matrimony by the first woman who combined superlative femaleness with virtue. Then he wondered if he could have loved Ora at that time; he certainly felt ten years older today. The word love brought him to his senses. It was formidable and definite. While he had believed himself to be in the throes of a second fever caught from a beautiful woman’s concordant magnetism, he had felt merely disgusted at his weakness, not in the least disloyal to his closest friend, whom he knew no woman could tempt him to betray. But he realised with hideous abruptness that if he were thrown with Ora Blake for any length of time she would become so necessary to him through the comprehensive appeal, which he only half understood, that he no more could pluck her out of him by the roots, as men disposed of the superficial passion when it became inconvenient, than he could tear the veins out of his hill with his hands. He had felt the danger dimly when with her, although he had made up his mind even then to get her out of Montana as quickly as possible. He vowed anew, with the first sensation of panic he had ever experienced, that the same sky should not cover them a week hence. He knew his influence over Mark Blake. Then he made a deliberate attempt to banish the subject from his mind, ordering his thoughts to their favorite haunts underground. But one little insidious tract, so difficult to control in all brains still young and human, showed a disposition to create startling and vivid pictures, to dream intensely, to cast up this woman’s face, fling it into his consciousness, with an automatic regularity that was like a diabolical challenge to his haughty will.