The months after Theresa's departure had been black ones for Alexander. For a time her face lived before him like a flame, but it had been extinguished by the winds of the mountains as he battled through them, and though his hands were burnt, he was glad of the scars. They told him he was stronger than the small vivid woman who had tried to steal his heart and the singleness of mind that meant so much to him. He desired nothing but his work to wife, yet Theresa had come fleetly into his existence, luring him to unfaithfulness. He threw her off, he trained himself to look coldly at the pictures on the mantelpiece, to tell her he had good reason to hate those smiling lips; but at bedtime, when he stood in the glow of the firelight and looked up at her, and bade her his unwilling good-night, he had no heart to leave her gazing into the darkness, and quietly turned her on her face, that she, too, might sleep. In truth, he could not hate those lips, for they were nobly human, and, with a young wisdom of their own, they defied his hatred, but his resentment against the eager life in her had a healthy bitterness. He could cast her off, but he could not cast out the passions her womanhood had aroused. There are men as fiercely virginal as any maiden, but this was no quality of Alexander. His disdain of the flesh, and now his loathing of it, came of his desire to be unhampered, untrammelled, the servant of nothing but his mind and spirit: it was the desire of the boy who had fought his temper and controlled his ordinary, wholesome hunger, because he must be supreme. It had been strengthened by experience of his father's weakness and encouraged by the clean solitude of the hills. Walking among them, lifting his feet high to overcome the heather, he had trampled, too, on ambition, and believed himself the master of his life; yet Theresa had come and thrown the commonest, most perilously lovely shackles on his hands and feet. Now, as he walked, he had another foe to conquer, and that was a harder matter, for he had thought himself secure, and lo! his enemy came on him before he was aware. The wildness that he had cloaked with his strength made him a fierce fighter, but the same wildness and the same strength were the qualities he had to combat. He was aghast at the terrible determination of nature. He had seen the torn sides of the hills, he had heard storms, howling round them with awful ruthlessness, but he had known no ruthlessness like this he battled with, that dragged the life from him and left him sunken in eye and cheek so that the raging of the winds was thereafter a little thing to him.