l ashamed for
covering a third of the world with its wonderful tangled network of
roots and branches, delicate shaking leaves, and its millions of spires
that caught the sun and wind and rain. Its very right to existence
seemed in question.

~II~

Sanderson accordingly came down, and on the whole his short visit
was a success. Why he came at all was a mystery to those who heard of
it, for he never paid visits and was certainly not the kind of man to
court a customer. There must have been something in Bittacy he liked.

Mrs. Bittacy was glad when he left. He brought no dress-suit for one
thing, not even a dinner-jacket, and he wore very low collars with big
balloon ties like a Frenchman, and let his hair grow longer than was
nice, she felt. Not that these things were important, but that she
considered them symptoms of something a little disordered. The ties were
unnecessarily flowing.

For all that he was an interesting man, and, in spite of his
eccentricities of dress and so forth, a gentleman. "Perhaps," she
reflected in her genuinely charitable heart, "he had other uses for the
twenty guineas, an invalid sister or an old mother to support!" She had
no notion of the cost of brushes, frames, paints, and canvases. Also she
forgave him much for the sake of his beautiful eyes and his eager
enthusiasm of manner. So many men of thirty were already blase.

Still, when the visit was over, she felt relieved. She said nothing
about his coming a second time, and her husband, she was glad to notice,
had likewise made no suggestion. For, truth to tell, the way the younger
man engrossed the older, keeping him out for hours in the Forest,
talking on the lawn in the blazing sun, and in the evenings when the
damp of dusk came creeping out from the surrounding woods, all
regardless of his age and usual habits, was not quite to her taste. Of
course, Mr. Sanderson did not know how easily those attacks of Indian
fever came back, but David surely might have told him.

They talked trees from morning to night. It stirred in her the old
subconscious trail of dread, a trail that led ever into the darkness of
big woods; and such feelings, as her early evangelical training taught
her, were temptings. To regard them in any other way was to play with
danger.

Her mind, as she watched these two, was charged with curious thoughts of
dread she could not understand, yet feared the more on that account. The
way they studied that old mangy c