innumerable times.
The hypnotized wild thing--hypnotized by its own vague instincts, or by
something outside itself-became to her as the Sphinx to the Egyptian,
the everlasting question of existence.

Now, as she watched the day fleeing, and night with swift stealthiness
coming on, that unforgettable picture of the Roumanian hills came to her
again. The instinct of those far-off days which had been little removed
from the finest animal intelligence had now developed into thought.
Brain and soul strove to grasp what it all meant, and what the
revelation was between Nature and herself. Nature was so vast; she
was so insignificant; changes in its motionless inorganic life were
imperceptible save through the telescopes of years; but she, like the
wind, the water, and the clouds, was variable, inconstant. Was there
any real relation between the vast, imperturbable earth, its seas, its
forests, its mountains and its plains, its life of tree and plant and
flower and the men and women dotted on its surface? Did they belong
to each other, or were mankind only, as it were, vermin infesting the
desirable world? Did they belong to each other? It meant so much if they
did belong, and she loved to think they did. Many a time she kissed the
smooth bole of a maple or whispered to it; or laid her cheek against a
mossy rock and murmured a greeting in the spirit of a companionship as
old as the making of the world.

On the evening of this day of her destiny--carrying the story of her own
fate within its twenty-four hours--she was in a mood of detachment from
life's routine. As at a great opera, a sensitive spirit loses itself
in visions alien to the music and yet born of it, so she, lost in this
primeval scene before her, saw visions of things to be.

If Ingolby's sight came back! In her abstraction she saw him with sight
restored and by her side, and even in that joy her mind felt a hovering
sense of invasion, no definite, visible thing, but a presence which made
shadow. Suddenly oppressed by it, she turned back into the woods from
the river-bank to make for home. She had explored nearly every portion
of this river-country for miles up and down, but on this evening, lost
in her dreams, she had wandered into less familiar regions. There was
no chance of her being lost, so long as she kept near to the river, and
indeed by instinct and not by thought or calculation she made her way
about at all times. Turned homeward, she walked for abou