side, he would let them trouble him no more after this
winter night. He saw now that from the first he had allowed his
imagination to bewilder him, to create a fantastic world in which he
suffered, molding innocent forms into terror and dismay. Vividly, he saw
again the black circle of oaks, growing in a haggard ring upon the
bastions of the Roman fort. The noise of the storm without grew louder,
and he thought how the wind had come up the valley with the sound of a
scream, how a great tree had ground its boughs together, shuddering
before the violent blast. Clear and distinct, as if he were standing now
in the lane, he saw the steep slopes surging from the valley, and the
black crown of the oaks set against the flaming sky, against a blaze and
glow of light as if great furnace doors were opened. He saw the fire, as
it were, smitten about the bastions, about the heaped mounds that guarded
the fort, and the crooked evil boughs seemed to writhe in the blast of
flame that beat from heaven. Strangely with the sight of the burning
fort mingled the impression of a dim white shape floating up the dusk of
the lane towards him, and he saw across the valley of years a girl's
face, a momentary apparition that shone and vanished away.

Then there was a memory of another day, of violent summer, of white
farmhouse walls blazing in the sun, and a far call from the reapers in
the cornfields. He had climbed the steep slope and penetrated the matted
thicket and lay in the heat, alone on the soft short grass that grew
within the fort. There was a cloud of madness, and confusion of broken
dreams that had no meaning or clue but only an indefinable horror and
defilement. He had fallen asleep as he gazed at the knotted fantastic
boughs of the stunted brake about him, and when he woke he was ashamed,
and fled away fearing that "they" would pursue him. He did not know who
"they" were, but it seemed as if a woman's face watched him from between
the matted boughs, and that she summoned to her side awful companions who
had never grown old through all the ages.

He looked up, it seemed, at a smiling face that bent over him, as he sat
in the cool dark kitchen of the old farmhouse, and wondered why the
sweetness of those red lips and the kindness of the eyes mingled with the
nightmare in the fort, with the horrible Sabbath he had imagined as he
lay sleeping on the hot soft turf. He had allowed these disturbed
fancies, all this mad wreck of terror and