look up, up, through vistas of
changing greens,--black-green to gold-green,--through a thousand
labyrinthine avenues and counter-avenues of leaves and branches, with
broken shafts of sunlight caught in them here and there, to the
glimpses of blue sky visible beyond. The tree gave you a sense of
great spaces, and depths, and differences, like a world; and it was
full of life, like a city. Birds came and went and hopped from bough
to bough, twittering importantly of affairs to them important;
squirrels scampered over the rough bark, in sudden panic haste, darting
little glances, sidewise and behind, after pursuers that (we will hope)
were fancied; and other birds, out of sight in the loftier regions,
piped their insistent calls, or sang their tireless epithalamiums.
Spiders hung in their gossamer lairs, only too tensely motionless not
to seem dead; but if a gnat came--with what swift, accurate, and
relentless vigour they sprang upon and garotted him. Sometimes a twig
snapped, or a young acorn fell, or a caterpillar let himself down by a
long silken thread. And the air under the oak was tonic with its good
oaken smell.

Susanna was leaning back in a sort of reverie, held by the charm of
these things. "We have no trees like this in Italy," she was vaguely
thinking. "The trees and the wild creatures are never so near to one
there; one never gets so intimate with them; Nature is not so
accessible and friendly." She remembered having read somewhere that
such enjoyment as she was now experiencing, the enjoyment of commune
with the mere sweet out-of-door things of the earth, was a Pagan
enjoyment, and un-Christian; and her mind revolted at this, and she
thought, "No. There would n't be any enjoyment, if one did n't know
that 'God's in His Heaven, all 's right with the world.'"

And just then her reverie was interrupted. . .

"He has arrived. I have seen him--what you call _seen_--with my own
eyes seen. There are about two yards of him; and a very spruce,
gentlemanlike, well-knit, and attractive two yards they are."

Thus, with a good deal of animation, in a pleasant, crisp old voice,
thus spoke Miss Sandus: a little old lady in black: little and very
daintily finished, with a daintily-chiselled profile, and a neat,
small-framed figure; in a black walking-skirt, that was short enough to
disclose a small, high-instepped, but eminently business-like pair of
brown boots. Miss Sandus (she gave you her word for it) was