“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 being.

The idea was too dim for her to see it face to face.  Its mere possibility dissolved the instant she focused it to get the truth behind it.  It was too utterly elusive, made, protaean.  Under the attack of even a minute’s concentration the very meaning of it vanished, melted away.  The idea lay really behind any words that she could ever find, beyond the touch of definite thought.

Her mind was unable to grapple with it.  But, while it vanished, the trail of its approach and disappearance flickered a moment before her shaking vision.  The horror certainly remained.