He forgot that his soul had ever been asleep. A sort of child frenzy for the mountains, such as Constance had echoed to him that wild day in March, grew upon him and possessed him, and he did not pause to remember that it ever had been otherwise. When the storm came down from the peaks, he strode out into it, and shouted his joy in its companionship, and raced with the wind, and threw himself face down in the wet leaves to smell the ground. And was it no more than the happiness of a lover who believes himself beloved that had wrought this change, or was there in this renewal of the mad joy of living the reopening and the flow of some deep and half-forgotten spring? From that day on the mountain he had not been the same. That morning with its new resolve; the following of the brook which had led him back to boyhood; the capture of the great trout; the battle with the mountain and the mist; the meeting with Constance at the top; the hermit's cabin with its story of self-denial and abnegation--its life so close to the very heart of nature, so far from idle pleasure and luxury--with that eventful day had come the change. In his letters to Constance, Frank did not speak of these things. He wrote of his walks, it is true, and he told her of his day's fishing--also of his visits to her father at the camp--but of any change or regeneration in himself, any renewal of old dreams and effort, he spoke not at all. The week lengthened before Constance returned, though it was clear from her letters that she was disinclined to linger at a big conventional hotel, when so much of the summer was slipping away in her beloved forest. From day to day they had expected to leave, she wrote, but as Mrs. Deane had persuaded herself that the Lake Placid practitioner had acquired some new and subtle understanding of nerve disorders, they were loath to hurry. The young lady ventured a suggestion that Mr. Weatherby was taking vast comfort in his freedom from the duties and responsibilities of accompanying a mushroom enthusiast in her daily rambles, especially a very exacting young person, with a predilection for trying new kinds upon him, and for seeking strange and semi-mythical specimens, peculiar to hazy and lofty altitudes.