tched behind, the power of the trees came close and caught her,
twining about her feet and arms, climbing to her very lips. She woke at
night, finding it difficult to breathe. There seemed wet leaves pressing
against her mouth, and soft green tendrils clinging to her neck. Her
feet were heavy, half rooted, as it were, in deep, thick earth. Huge
creepers stretched along the whole of that black tunnel, feeling about
her person for points where they might fasten well, as ivy or the giant
parasites of the Vegetable Kingdom settle down on the trees themselves
to sap their life and kill them.

Slowly and surely the morbid growth possessed her life and held her. She
feared those very winds that ran about the wintry forest. They were in
league with it. They helped it everywhere.

"Why don't you sleep, dear?" It was her husband now who played the role
of nurse, tending her little wants with an honest care that at least
aped the services of love. He was so utterly unconscious of the raging
battle he had caused. "What is it keeps you so wide awake and restless?"

"The winds," she whispered in the dark. For hours she had been watching
the tossing of the trees through the blindless windows. "They go walking
and talking everywhere to-night, keeping me awake. And all the time they
call so loudly to you."

And his strange whispered answer appalled her for a moment until the
meaning of it faded and left her in a dark confusion of the mind that
was now becoming almost permanent.

"The trees excite them in the night. The winds are the great swift
carriers. Go with them, dear--and not against. You'll find sleep that
way if you do."

"The storm is rising," she began, hardly knowing what she said.

"All the more then--go with them. Don't resist. They'll take you to the
trees, that's all."

Resist! The word touched on the button of some text that once had helped
her.

"Resist the devil and he will flee from you," she heard her whispered
answer, and the same second had buried her face beneath the clothes in a
flood of hysterical weeping.

But her husband did not seem disturbed. Perhaps he did not hear it, for
the wind ran just then against the windows with a booming shout, and the
roaring of the Forest farther out came behind the blow, surging into the
room. Perhaps, too, he was already asleep again. She slowly regained a
sort of dull composure. Her face emerged from the tangle of sheets and
blankets. With a growing terror over her