Lewis heard and smiled. The sun and wind of the hills beat in his
pulses like wine. To have breathed all day the fragrance of heather and
pines, to have gladdened the eye with an infinite distance and blue
lines of mountain, was with this man to have drunk the cup of
intoxicating youth. The cool gloaming did not chill; rather it was the
high and solemn aftermath of the day's harvesting. The faces of
gracious women seemed blent with the pageant of summer weather; kindly
voices, simple joys--for a moment they seemed to him the major matters in
life. So far it was pleasing fancy, but Alice soon entered to disturb
with the disquieting glory of her hair. The family of the Haystouns had
ever a knack of fine sentiment. Fantastic, unpractical, they were
gluttons for the romantic, the recondite, and the dainty. But now had
come a breath of strong wind which rent the meshes of a philandering
fancy. A very new and strange feeling was beginning to make itself
known. He had come to think of Alice with the hot pained affection
which makes the high mountains of the world sink for the time to a
species of mole-hillock. She danced through his dreams and usurped all
the paths of his ambition. Formerly he had thought of himself--for the
man was given to self-portraiture--as the adventurer, the scorner of the
domestic; now he struggled to regain the old attitude, but he struggled
in vain.
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