she paced, and all the
blossoms glowed more vividly at her nearness, the branches stretching
toward her, rippling with eagerness.

Priestess though she was, he could not believe that she was going to
come within touch of that Tree the very sight of which roused such a
panic instinct of revulsion in every fiber of him. But she did not
swerve or slow in her advance. Walking delicately over the flowery
grass, arrogantly luminous in the twilight, so that her body was the
center and focus of any landscape she walked in, she neared her horribly
eager god.

Now she was under the Tree, and its trunk had writhed down over her and
she was lifting her arms like a girl to her lover. With a gliding
slowness the flame-tipped branches slid round her. In that incredible
embrace she stood immobile for a long moment, the Tree arching down with
all its curling limbs, the girl straining upward, her head thrown back
and the mantle of her hair swinging free of her body as she lifted her
face to the quivering blossoms. The branches gathered her closer in
their embrace. Now the blossoms arched near, curving down all about her,
touching her very gently, twisting their blazing faces toward the focus
of her moon-white body. One poised directly above her face, trembled,
brushed her mouth lightly. And the Tree's tremor ran unbroken through
the body of the girl it clasped.

* * * * *

The incredible dreadfulness of that embrace was suddenly more than Smith
could bear. All his terrors, crushed down with so stern a self-control,
without warning burst all bounds and rushed over him in a flood of blind
revulsion. A whimper choked up in his throat and quite involuntarily he
swung round and plunged into the shielding trees, hands to his eyes in a
futile effort to blot out the sight of lovely horror behind him whose
vividness was burnt upon his very brain.

Heedlessly he blundered through the trees, no thought in his
terror-blank mind save the necessity to run, run, run until he could run
no more. He had given up all attempt at reason and rationality; he no
longer cared why the beauty of the Tree was so dreadful. He only knew
that until all space lay between him and its symmetry he must run and
run and run.

What brought that frenzied madness to an end he never knew. When sanity
returned to him he was lying face down on the flower-spangled sward in a
silence so deep that his ears ached with its heaviness. The grass wa