All this she never framed in words, the subtleties of language lay far beyond her reach.  But instinctively she felt it; and more besides.  It troubled her profoundly.  Chiefly, moreover, for her husband.  Merely for herself, the nightmare might have left her cold.  It was David’s peculiar interest in the trees that gave the special invitation.  Jealousy, then, in its most subtle aspect came to strengthen this aversion and dislike, for it came in a form that no reasonable wife could possibly object to.  Her husband’s passion, she reflected, was natural and inborn.  It had decided his vocation, fed his ambition, nourished his dreams, desires, hopes.  All his best years of active life had been spent in the care and guardianship of trees.  He knew them, understood their secret life and nature, “managed” them intuitively as other men “managed” dogs and horses.  He could not live for long away from them without a strange, acute nostalgia that stole his peace of mind and consequently his strength of body.  A forest made him happy and at peace; it nursed and fed and soothed his deepest moods.  Trees influenced the sources of his life, lowered or raised the very heart-beat in him.  Cut off from them he languished as a lover of the sea can droop inland, or a mountaineer may pine in the flat monotony of the plains.

This she could understand, in a fashion at least, and make allowances for.  She had yielded gently, even sweetly, to his choice of their English home; for in the little island there is nothing that suggests the woods of wilder countries so nearly as the New Forest.  It has the genuine air and mystery, the depth and splendor, the loneliness, and there and there the strong, untamable quality of old-time forests as Bittacy of the Department knew them.

In a single detail only had he yielded to her wishes.  He consented to a cottage on the edge, instead of in the heart of it.  And for a dozen years now they had dwelt in peace and happiness at the lips of this great spreading thing that covered so many leagues with its tangle of swamps and moors and splendid ancient trees.

Only with the last two years or so—­with his own increasing age, and physical decline perhaps—­had come this marked growth of passionate interest in the welfare of the Forest.  She had watched it grow, at first had laughed at it, then talked sympathetically so far as sincerity permitted, then had argued mildly, and finally come to realize that its treatment lay altogether beyond her powers, and so had come to fear it with all her heart.

The six weeks they annually spent away from their English home, each regarded very differently, of course.  For her husband it meant a painful exile that did his health no good; he yearned for his trees—­the sight and sound and smell of them; but for herself it meant release from a haunting dread—­escape.  To renounce those six weeks by the sea on the sunny, shining coast of France, was almost more than this little woman, even with her unselfishness, could face.