t further out--the thing that was ever
roaring at the center was dreadfully increasing.

The sense of definite battle, too--battle between herself and the Forest
for his soul--came with it. Its presentiment was as clear as though
Thompson had come into the room and quietly told her that the cottage
was surrounded. "Please, ma'am, there are trees come up about the
house," she might have suddenly announced. And equally might have heard
her own answer: "It's all right, Thompson. The main body is still far
away."

Immediately upon its heels, then, came another truth, with a close
reality that shocked her. She saw that jealousy was not confined to the
human and animal world alone, but ran though all creation. The Vegetable
Kingdom knew it too. So-called inanimate nature shared it with the rest.
Trees felt it. This Forest just beyond the window--standing there in the
silence of the autumn evening across the little lawn--this Forest
understood it equally. The remorseless, branching power that sought to
keep exclusively for itself the thing it loved and needed, spread like a
running desire through all its million leaves and stems and roots. In
humans, of course, it was consciously directed; in animals it acted with
frank instinctiveness; but in trees this jealousy rose in some blind
tide of impersonal and unconscious wrath that would sweep opposition
from its path as the wind sweeps powdered snow from the surface of the
ice. Their number was a host with endless reinforcements, and once it
realized its passion was returned the power increased.... Her husband
loved the trees.... They had become aware of it.... They would take him
from her in the end....

Then, while she heard his footsteps in the hall and the closing of the
front door, she saw a third thing clearly;--realized the widening of the
gap between herself and him. This other love had made it. All these
weeks of the summer when she felt so close to him, now especially when
she had made the biggest sacrifice of her life to stay by his side and
help him, he had been slowly, surely--drawing away. The estrangement was
here and now--a fact accomplished. It had been all this time maturing;
there yawned this broad deep space between them. Across the empty
distance she saw the change in merciless perspective. It revealed his
face and figure, dearly-loved, once fondly worshipped, far on the other
side in shadowy distance, small, the back turned from her, and moving
while she w