rds before. "They get
into touch with me, as it were?" he ventured, laughing at his own
sentence, yet laughing only with his lips.

"Exactly," was the quick, emphatic reply. "They seek to blend with
something they feel instinctively to be good for them, helpful to their
essential beings, encouraging to their best expression--their life."

"Good Lord, Sir!" Bittacy heard himself saying, "but you're putting my
own thoughts into words. D'you know, I've felt something like that for
years. As though--" he looked round to make sure his wife was not there,
then finished the sentence--"as though the trees were after me!"

"'Amalgamate' seems the best word, perhaps," said Sanderson slowly.
"They would draw you to themselves. Good forces, you see, always seek to
merge; evil to separate; that's why Good in the end must always win the
day--everywhere. The accumulation in the long run becomes overwhelming.
Evil tends to separation, dissolution, death. The comradeship of trees,
their instinct to run together, is a vital symbol. Trees in a mass are
good; alone, you may take it generally, are--well, dangerous. Look at a
monkey-puzzler, or better still, a holly. Look at it, watch it,
understand it. Did you ever see more plainly an evil thought made
visible? They're wicked. Beautiful too, oh yes! There's a strange,
miscalculated beauty often in evil--"

"That cedar, then--?"

"Not evil, no; but alien, rather. Cedars grow in forests all together.
The poor thing has drifted, that is all."

They were getting rather deep. Sanderson, talking against time, spoke so
fast. It was too condensed. Bittacy hardly followed that last bit. His
mind floundered among his own less definite, less sorted thoughts, till
presently another sentence from the artist startled him into attention
again.

"That cedar will protect you here, though, because you both have
humanized it by your thinking so lovingly of its presence. The others
can't get past it, as it were."

"Protect me!" he exclaimed. "Protect me from their love?"

Sanderson laughed. "We're getting rather mixed," he said; "we're talking
of one thing in the terms of another really. But what I mean is--you
see--that their love for you, their 'awareness' of your personality and
presence involves the idea of winning you--across the border--into
themselves--into their world of living. It means, in a way, taking you
over."

The ideas the artist started in his mind ran furious wild races to and
fr