ing moisture that knew no wholesome tonic of keen frosts.
Alone with her thoughts, both her husband and her God withdrawn into
distance, she counted the days to Spring. She groped her way, stumbling
down the long dark tunnel. Through the arch at the far end lay a
brilliant picture of the violet sea sparkling on the coast of France.
There lay safety and escape for both of them, could she but hold on.
Behind her the trees blocked up the other entrance. She never once
looked back.

She drooped. Vitality passed from her, drawn out and away as by some
steady suction. Immense and incessant was this sensation of her powers
draining off. The taps were all turned on. Her personality, as it were,
streamed steadily away, coaxed outwards by this Power that never wearied
and seemed inexhaustible. It won her as the full moon wins the tide. She
waned; she faded; she obeyed.

At first she watched the process, and recognized exactly what was going
on. Her physical life, and that balance of mind which depends on
physical well-being, were being slowly undermined. She saw that clearly.
Only the soul, dwelling like a star apart from these and independent of
them, lay safe somewhere--with her distant God. That she
knew--tranquilly. The spiritual love that linked her to her husband was
safe from all attack. Later, in His good time, they would merge together
again because of it. But meanwhile, all of her that had kinship with the
earth was slowly going. This separation was being remorselessly
accomplished. Every part of her the trees could touch was being steadily
drained from her. She was being--removed.

After a time, however, even this power of realization went, so that she
no longer "watched the process" or knew exactly what was going on. The
one satisfaction she had known--the feeling that it was sweet to suffer
for his sake--went with it. She stood utterly alone with this terror of
the trees ... mid the ruins of her broken and disordered mind.

She slept badly; woke in the morning with hot and tired eyes; her head
ached dully; she grew confused in thought and lost the clues of daily
life in the most feeble fashion. At the same time she lost sight, too,
of that brilliant picture at the exist of the tunnel; it faded away into
a tiny semicircle of pale light, the violet sea and the sunshine the
merest point of white, remote as a star and equally inaccessible. She
knew now that she could never reach it. And through the darkness that
stre