trees came nearer to her. She caught her breath and stared about her,
listening intently. The trees, perhaps because she saw them more in
detail now, it seemed to her had changed. A vague, faint alteration
spread over them, at first so slight she scarcely would admit it, then
growing steadily, though still obscurely, outwards. "They tremble and
are changed," flashed through her mind the horrid line that Sanderson
had quoted. Yet the change was graceful for all the uncouthness
attendant upon the size of so vast a movement. They had turned in her
direction. That was it. _They saw her._ In this way the change
expressed itself in her groping, terrified thought. Till now it had been
otherwise: she had looked at them from her own point of view; now they
looked at her from theirs. They stared her in the face and eyes; they
stared at her all over. In some unkind, resentful, hostile way, they
watched her. Hitherto in life she had watched them variously, in
superficial ways, reading into them what her own mind suggested. Now
they read into her the things they actually _were_, and not merely
another's interpretations of them.

They seemed in their motionless silence there instinct with life, a
life, moreover, that breathed about her a species of terrible soft
enchantment that bewitched. It branched all through her, climbing to the
brain. The Forest held her with its huge and giant fascination. In this
secluded breathing spot that the centuries had left untouched, she had
stepped close against the hidden pulse of the whole collective mass of
them. They were aware of her and had turned to gaze with their myriad,
vast sight upon the intruder. They shouted at her in the silence. For
she wanted to look back at them, but it was like staring at a crowd, and
her glance merely shifted from one tree to another, hurriedly, finding
in none the one she sought. They saw her so easily, each and all. The
rows that stood behind her also stared. But she could not return the
gaze. Her husband, she realized, could. And their steady stare shocked
her as though in some sense she knew that she was naked. They saw so
much of her: she saw of them--so little.

Her efforts to return their gaze were pitiful. The constant shifting
increased her bewilderment. Conscious of this awful and enormous sight
all over her, she let her eyes first rest upon the ground, and then she
closed them altogether. She kept the lids as tight together as ever they
would go.

B