ich will help to make their lives a little
better?'

Harvey nodded.

Their feet sank in the mossy ruin of immemorial summers. Overhead, the
larch-boughs dangled green tresses, or a grove of beech shook sunlight
through branches decked with translucent gold. Now and then they came
out into open spaces, where trees rent from the soil, dead amid
spring's leafage, told of a great winter storm; new grass grew thickly
about the shattered trunks, and in the hollows whence the roots had
been torn. One moment they stood in shadow; the next, moved upward into
a great splash of sunshine, thrown upon moss that still glistened with
the dews of the night, and on splints of crag painted green and gold
with lichen. Sun or shadow; the sweet fir-scents breathed upon their
faces, mingled with many a waft of perfume from little woodland plants.

More than once Mrs. Abbott had to pause. Midway she was tempted by a
singular resting-place. It was a larch tree, perhaps thirty feet high;
at the beginning of its growth, the stem had by some natural means been
so diverted as to grow horizontally for a yard or more at a couple of
feet above the ground; it had then made a curve downwards, and finally,
by way of a perfect loop across itself, had shot again in the true
direction, growing at last, with straight and noble trunk, like its
undistorted neighbours. Much wondering at so strange a deformity, Mrs
Abbott seated herself on the level portion, and Harvey, as he stood
before her, told a fancy that had come to him when for the first time
he chanced to climb this way. Might not the tree represent some human
life? A weak, dubious, all but hopeless beginning; a check; a return
upon itself; a laboured circling; last a healthful maturity, upright,
triumphing. He spoke with his eyes on the ground. Raising them at the
end, he was astonished to see that his companion had flushed deeply;
and only then it occurred to him that this parable might be applied by
the hearer to herself.

'To make a confession,' he added at once, 'it forcibly reminded me of
my own life--except that I can't pretend to be "triumphing".'

His laugh did not cover the embarrassment with which he discovered
that, if anything, he had made matters worse. Here was an instance of
his incorrigible want of tact; much better to have offered no
application of the fable at all, and to have turned the talk. He had
told a simple truth, but with the result of appearing to glorify
himself, and