rom the trees--into the mind--into the house."

He looked at her keenly for a moment.

"That must be why I love them then," he answered. "They blow the souls
of the trees about the sky like clouds."

The conversation dropped. She had never heard him talk in quite that way
before.

And another time, when he had coaxed her to go with him down one of the
nearer glades, she asked why he took the small hand-axe with him, and
what he wanted it for.

"To cut the ivy that clings to the trunks and takes their life away," he
said.

"But can't the verdurers do that?" she asked. "That's what they're paid
for, isn't it?"

Whereupon he explained that ivy was a parasite the trees knew not how to
fight alone, and that the verdurers were careless and did not do it
thoroughly. They gave a chop here and there, leaving the tree to do the
rest for itself if it could.

"Besides, I like to do it for them. I love to help them and protect," he
added, the foliage rustling all about his quiet words as they went.

And these stray remarks, as his attitude towards the broken cedar,
betrayed this curious, subtle change that was going forward to his
personality. Slowly and surely all the summer it had increased.

It was growing--the thought startled her horribly--just as a tree grows,
the outer evidence from day to day so slight as to be unnoticeable, yet
the rising tide so deep and irresistible. The alteration spread all
through and over him, was in both mind and actions, sometimes almost in
his face as well. Occasionally, thus, it stood up straight outside
himself and frightened her. His life was somehow becoming linked so
intimately with trees, and with all that trees signified. His interests
became more and more their interests, his activity combined with theirs,
his thoughts and feelings theirs, his purpose, hope, desire, his fate--

His fate! The darkness of some vague, enormous terror dropped its shadow
on her when she thought of it. Some instinct in her heart she dreaded
infinitely more than death--for death meant sweet translation for his
soul--came gradually to associate the thought of him with the thought of
trees, in particular with these Forest trees. Sometimes, before she
could face the thing, argue it away, or pray it into silence, she found
the thought of him running swiftly through her mind like a thought of
the Forest itself, the two most intimately linked and joined together,
each a part and complement of the other, one