It was a long time before she slept. A mouse scratched in the wall, somewhere a door was shaken in its frame, and often the stairs creaked as though a foot had pressed them. She hated the bed she lay on, and the blankets covering her; they were unbearably intimate. This was the pillow Alexander's head had dinted, and the moon made his possessions clear to her wakeful eyes. The room was whitewashed, and the walls, against which many books were stacked, were bare of pictures. "Dull creature!" she exclaimed, and, muffled to the chin, sat up in bed, determined to be done with foolishness. She would not allow the man to mar her joy, for to do so was to admit an importance to which he had no right. She punched the pillow defiantly and, holding her ankles, rested her chin on her knees. Sitting thus she could see the shoulder of the Blue Hill, and she nodded to it grimly, in a kind of challenge, for it seemed to hold the judicial scales between her and Alexander, and to persuade her to its own wise tolerance. What, it asked mildly, had Alexander done to offend? and she was bound to answer: "Nothing. Nothing but make me feel inferior, ever since I first heard his name. How could I like a boy who was not afraid of geese when I was terrified by them? A boy who tramped long miles to school at an age when I thought it an adventure to go down to the docks, a clever boy who won scholarships I knew I could never get? I was prejudiced against him at ten years old! Oh, Alexander, I have been very silly! I'm quite willing to be friends." She kissed her hand. "We are friends, I tell you. But be careful how you behave, my man. I'm very hard to please!" She laughed at the moonlit night. "As if he cares!" And then, hitting the pillow forcefully again, "Oh, but if I saw him, I'd make him care!" A beautiful windy morning waked her. She found her father on the horse-block, his nose and cheeks blue with cold, his eyes reddened but bright with joy. "Where shall we go to-day, Theresa? I hoped to take you to see Janet, but Clara tells me it is not convenient, so that must be for another time. There are the Spiked Crags--look! You see them? And the Blue Hill, and what Alexander calls the school track----" "The Spiked Crags, please," she said. He nodded. "I knew you would choose them." During the ascent, she owed it to her father's breathlessness that they did not talk, and in the silence that was only broken by his panting Theresa could realize the hills. Yet she wished she were quite alone. She could feel her father's mind, like his body, straining after her wondering what she thought of this and that, watching for signs, and her desire was to sit as unheeded as a stone and let the winds play over her, and be a little part of something so much vaster than herself that her petty frets and follies would be of no more moment than the sound of one heather stalk grating against another.