refinement to it.

Half in fear of what this might mean, he shook himself free of the
mood, and moving a chair to the other side of the fire sat down.
Behind her the old clock still ticked as though in malicious
appreciation of the situation.

She clung to the subject of the woods as though in it she found relief.
She wished to hear more of it from him. It made him appear less a
stranger. When he spoke of these things he went back into her own
past--into the most beautiful, intimate part of it. He was the only
man other than Mr. Arsdale that she could have endured to associate
with those days. She felt at ease with him there, and this made her
feel that he had more right to be here now. His eager face softened
when he spoke of those things. There was in it then none of that
fierceness which had for a moment startled her when he spoke of the
loneliness he had found here in New York. At that moment he had looked
like a man at bay. He had challenged life bitterly. It was not in
keeping with the kindly generous strength of his mouth and chin.

"Tell me," she asked him, "of some of your days in the woods."

Yesterday he could not have complied. Those days had seemed dead and
buried. Now he was in the mood for it. He found it pleasant, sitting
here, to go back.

Each hour stood out as bright with sunshine as a Sorolla. It was as
though they had sprung to life at a call from her--had come to bring
her ease. He talked at random of brooks that start nowhere and go
nowhere, save over white stones and past watercress; of thin ribbed
ferns and of scarlet bunchberries. He told her of a stream he knew,
where, if you lie very quiet in the moss, you see speckled trout dart
over white pebbles into the darker water beneath the lichened rocks.
He told her of the shallows, and pools, and falls you find if you keep
to its banks for the miles it sings by the grave trees. He told her of
mountain tops where he had lain near the stars and watched the noon
clouds sweep half a county with their big shadows. He told her of old
wood roads he had followed through the young maples and birches and
evergreens and pines--roads which lay silent all day long and all night
long, month after month, ready for the feet which might tread it once
in a year.

So she took him back again to the redolent shadows, back to the
silences where dreams are born. Here he came upon other things--the
old path gay flowered with illusions which led hi