x 'The story of the leaves that
marched'; I shall call the second 'The mist that came up suddenly.'

"Two weeks had passed; quiet days, slow weeks, quiet and slow as the
sunlight through the trees. The two doctors at the hunting-lodge, round,
sharp-spoken men, with big, near-sighted spectacles, rubbed their hands
together and nodded with certainty when they held their daily
consultations. 'He is improving rapidly,' they said. 'The lines in his
face are going. A little more exercise, a little more diversion--so!'
They imagined crosses on their chests.

"Have you ever known mist on a moonlight night in a forest? Not a woods,
not an open country with timber scattered through it, but a real forest;
so limitless, so close-pressing, that one has the same sense of
diminished personality and at the same time the same sense of all
obstructions cleared away between oneself and the loneliness of the
universe that one has at sea. As if, that is, you found yourself, a mere
shadow in the darkness, kneeling close before an altar on which blazed,
so that you could not altogether raise your head, the magnificence of a
star. But mist in a moonlight forest is even more disembodying than mist
on a moonlight sea. There are the dark masses of the trees, showing
every now and then above the changing wraiths of white, and the summits
of half-seen hills, to give an impression of a horizon near yet
seemingly unattainable.

"They had finished supper in the great oak-ceilinged room down below,
where a fire burned in the stone embrasure, and the soft lights of
candles in silver candelabra made only more tenebrous the darkness
overhead. The Maimed Man leaned back in his chair and peered with
narrowed eyelids through the smoke of his cigar at the long table
stretching away from him. For a moment he felt reassured; a hint of the
old assurance that had once been one of his greatest gifts. It was
partly a physical thing, stirring in his veins like the cool blood that
follows the awakening from healthy sleep. The sight of all these friends
of his, these followers of his, with their keen, sunburnt faces, or
their wrinkled and wise ones--! Surely he occupied a position almost
unassailable; almost as unassailable as that of the God of Force whose
purposes of late had at times puzzled him in a new and disturbing way--.
What nonsense! He gripped power as securely as he could grip, if he
wished, his sword. What strength in heaven or earth could break a man's