She drove her aunt all morning in the little pony-cart and wrote letters after lunch, Gavan being left to the general’s care. It was not until later that she assumed toward him the more personal offices of deputy hostess, meeting him in the hall as she emerged from the morning-room, her thick sheaf of letters in her hand, and proposing a walk before tea. She took him up the well-remembered path beside the burn; but now, in the clear autumnal afternoon, he seemed further from her than last night before the fire. Already he had seen that the sense of nearness or distance depended on her will rather than his own; so that it was now she who chose to talk of trivial things, not referring by word or look to the old memories, deepest of all, that crowded about him on the hilltop, not even when, breasting the wind, they passed the solitary group of pine-trees, where she had so deeply shared his suffering, so wonderfully comprehended his fears. She strode against the twisted flappings of her skirt, tawny strands of hair whipping across her throat, her hands deeply thrust into her pockets, her head unbowed before the enormous buffets of the wind, and he felt anew the hardy energy that would make tender, lingering touches upon the notes of the past rare things with her. In the uproar of air, any sequence of talk was difficult. Her clear voice seemed to shout to him, like the cold shocks of a mountain stream leaping from ledge to ledge, and the trivial things she said were like the tossing of spray upon that current of deep, joyful energy. “Isn’t it splendid!” she exclaimed at last. They had walked two miles along the crest of the hill, and, smiling in looking round at him, her face, all the sky behind it, all the wind around it, made the word match his own appreciation. “Splendid,” he assented, thinking of her glance and poise. Still bending her smile upon him, she said, “You already look different.” “Different from what?” he asked, amused by her expression, as of a kindly, diagnosing young doctor. “From last night. From what I felt of you. One might have thought that you had lost the capacity for feeling splendor.” “Why should you have imagined me so deadened?” He kept his cheerful curiosity. “I don’t know. I did. There,”--she paused to point,--“do you remember the wind-mill, Gavan? The old miller is dead and his son is the miller now; but the mill looks just as it did when we were little. It makes one think of birds and ships, doesn’t it?--with the beauty that it stays and doesn’t pass. When I was a child--did I ever confide it to you?--my dream was to catch one of the sails as it came down and let it carry me up, up, and right around. What fun it would have been! I suppose that one could have held on.” “In pretty grim earnest, after the first fun.” “It would be the sense of coming grimness that would make the desperate thrill of it.” “You are fond of thrills and perils.”