"Do you mind," she said, "if I go on ahead of you? I'm--I'm so impatient to get to the top." He smiled and nodded, patting his chest to account for lack of speech. "You're sure you don't mind?" "Yes, yes," he nodded, and she sped on. But she did not sit and ponder on her insignificance. Joy took hold of her and made her its own. There was a great tumult of singing in her breast, the wind lashed her, torturing her skirt and flicking the hair into her eyes until she clapped a hand to each side of her head to control the struggling locks, and let go again to wrestle with the greater problem of her petticoats and to wind her skirt about her waist. She danced through the hard patches of snow lying here and there; she shouted because she knew the wind would tear the sound and scatter it; she was as light as the driven clouds, and she waved her hands to them. She forgot Mr. Partiloe, or, remembering him, did not shudder; she forgot the restlessness of her being, and rejoiced in the lithe young body that bent easily before the wind, and pushed its way against it, and loved its buffeting. There was no one to watch her and, when she reached the summit, she behaved with the abandonment of all young things in the spring-time of the year and their own lives. Little pigs, and lambs, and colts have their squealing, skipping, prancing ways of praising God, and Theresa had her own. She ran as fast as the wind would let her, with her hands high above her head; she lay down in the places which the snow disdained; she drove her fingers into the snow and sucked them warm again; and she loosed her hair so that it was flung out like a pennon. Dishevelment is seldom fair to see, and Theresa did not look beautiful. She did not care. She wanted to feel the wind's fingers at the roots of her hair, and she liked the tug and the sound as the strands were whipped this way and that. She stood alone on the mountain top, and gave her body to the elements, yet remained free. The elements made a generous lover: they took all she could give, yet they kept nothing, and they resigned her at a word. Poor little Grace, she thought, to be fastened for ever to the body and soul of a man, even though the man had intelligent green eyes and an adoring heart! It was better to be the wind's lady--easy come and easy go, and no fragile human feelings to be a hindrance. The sight of her father toiling upward sobered her ecstasy. She sat down to await him, feeding on beauty as she braided her hair. She could see the valley, the lake, and the river all running towards the sea between walls of ever lessening hills. Here, at the valley's head, they were immense; they swept to the sky and rolled their great backs into distant valleys, and the little homesteads down below were meek in their shadow; but, like a wave that has spent its strength, the heights diminished as they approached the shore, that shore lying between two oceans, the one of water and the one of hills.