use he
was so kind and gentle, doing all he could to make her sacrifice as easy
as possible.

"David, you really _are_ unwise to go out now. The night is damp and
very chilly. The ground is soaked in dew. You'll catch your death of
cold."

His face lightened. "Won't you come with me, dear,--just for once? I'm
only going to the corner of the hollies to see the beech that stands so
lonely by itself."

She had been out with him in the short dark afternoon, and they had
passed that evil group of hollies where the gypsies camped. Nothing else
would grow there, but the hollies thrive upon the stony soil.

"David, the beech is all right and safe." She had learned his
phraseology a little, made clever out of due season by her love.
"There's no wind to-night."

"But it's rising," he answered, "rising in the east. I heard it in the
bare and hungry larches. They need the sun and dew, and always cry out
when the wind's upon them from the east."

She sent a short unspoken prayer most swiftly to her deity as she heard
him say it. For every time now, when he spoke in this familiar, intimate
way of the life of the trees, she felt a sheet of cold fasten tight
against her very skin and flesh. She shivered. How could he possibly
know such things?

Yet, in all else, and in the relations of his daily life, he was sane
and reasonable, loving, kind and tender. It was only on the subject of
the trees he seemed unhinged and queer. Most curiously it seemed that,
since the collapse of the cedar they both loved, though in different
fashion, his departure from the normal had increased. Why else did he
watch them as a man might watch a sickly child? Why did he hunger
especially in the dusk to catch their "mood of night" as he called it?
Why think so carefully upon them when the frost was threatening or the
wind appeared to rise?

As she put it so frequently now herself--How could he possibly _know_
such things?

He went. As she closed the front door after him she heard the distant
roaring in the Forest.

And then it suddenly struck her: How could she know them too?

It dropped upon her like a blow that she felt at once all over, upon
body, heart and mind. The discovery rushed out from its ambush to
overwhelm. The truth of it, making all arguing futile, numbed her
faculties. But though at first it deadened her, she soon revived, and
her being rose into aggressive opposition. A wild yet calculated courage
like that which animates the l