f utterly alone,
even trying to make his passage easy. It seemed that she stood at the
bottom of some huge ravine that opened in her mind, the walls whereof
instead of rock were trees that reached enormous to the sky, engulfing
her. God alone knew that she was there. He watched, permitted, even
perhaps approved. At any rate--He knew.

During those quiet evenings in the house, moreover, while they sat over
the fire listening to the roaming winds about the house, her husband
knew continual access to the world his alien love had furnished for him.
Never for a single instant was he cut off from it. She gazed at the
newspaper spread before his face and knees, saw the smoke of his cheroot
curl up above the edge, noticed the little hole in his evening socks,
and listened to the paragraphs he read aloud as of old. But this was all
a veil he spread about himself of purpose. Behind it--he escaped. It was
the conjurer's trick to divert the sight to unimportant details while
the essential thing went forward unobserved. He managed wonderfully; she
loved him for the pains he took to spare her distress; but all the while
she knew that the body lolling in that armchair before her eyes
contained the merest fragment of his actual self. It was little better
than a corpse. It was an empty shell. The essential soul of him was out
yonder with the Forest--farther out near that ever-roaring heart of it.

And, with the dark, the Forest came up boldly and pressed against the
very walls and windows, peering in upon them, joining hands above the
slates and chimneys. The winds were always walking on the lawn and
gravel paths; steps came and went and came again; some one seemed always
talking in the woods, some one was in the building too. She passed them
on the stairs, or running soft and muffled, very large and gentle, down
the passages and landings after dusk, as though loose fragments of the
Day had broken off and stayed there caught among the shadows, trying to
get out. They blundered silently all about the house. They waited till
she passed, then made a run for it. And her husband always knew. She saw
him more than once deliberately avoid them--because _she_ was there.
More than once, too, she saw him stand and listen when he thought she
was not near, then heard herself the long bounding stride of their
approach across the silent garden. Already _he_ had heard them in the
windy distance of the night, far, far away. They sped, she well knew,
a