forced silence fell upon him. Hilda seemed gradually to lose herself
in reverie. After a time she said softly.

"Don't you love this woods?"

"It's an excellent bunch of pine," replied Thorpe bluntly. "It'll cut
three million at least."

"Oh!" she cried drawing back, her hands pressed against the log either
side of her, her eyes wide.

After a moment she caught her breath convulsively, and Thorpe became
conscious that she was studying him furtively with a quickening doubt.

After that, by the mercy of God, there was no more talk between them.
She was too hurt and shocked and disillusioned to make the necessary
effort to go away. He was too proud to put an end to the position.
They sat there apparently absorbed in thought, while all about them
the accustomed life of the woods drew nearer and nearer to them, as the
splash of their entrance into it died away.

A red squirrel poised thirty feet above them, leaped, and clung swaying
to a sapling-top a dozen yards from the tree he had quitted. Two
chickadees upside down uttering liquid undertones, searched busily
for insects next their heads. Wilson's warblers, pine creepers,
black-throats, myrtle and magnolia warblers, oven birds, peewits, blue
jays, purple finches, passed silently or noisily, each according to his
kind. Once a lone spruce hen dusted herself in a stray patch of sunlight
until it shimmered on a tree trunk, raised upward, and disappeared, to
give place to long level dusty shafts that shot here and there through
the pines laying the spell of sunset on the noisy woods brawlers.

Unconsciously the first strain of opposition and of hurt surprise had
relaxed. Each thought vaguely his thoughts. Then in the depths of the
forest, perhaps near at hand, perhaps far away, a single hermit thrush
began to sing. His song was of three solemn deep liquid notes;
followed by a slight rhetorical pause as of contemplation; and then,
deliberately, three notes more on a different key--and so on without
haste and without pause. It is the most dignified, the most spiritual,
the holiest of woods utterances. Combined with the evening shadows
and the warm soft air, it offered to the heart an almost irresistible
appeal. The man's artificial antagonism modified; the woman's
disenchantment began to seem unreal.

Then subtly over and through the bird-song another sound became audible.
At first it merely repeated the three notes faintly, like an echo, but
with a rich, sad undertone