As she put it so frequently now herself—­How could he possibly know such things?

He went.  As she closed the front door after him she heard the distant roaring in the Forest.

And then it suddenly struck her:  How could she know them too?

It dropped upon her like a blow that she felt at once all over, upon body, heart and mind.  The discovery rushed out from its ambush to overwhelm.  The truth of it, making all arguing futile, numbed her faculties.  But though at first it deadened her, she soon revived, and her being rose into aggressive opposition.  A wild yet calculated courage like that which animates the leaders of splendid forlorn hopes flamed in her little person—­flamed grandly, and invincible.  While knowing herself insignificant and weak, she knew at the same time that power at her back which moves the worlds.  The faith that filled her was the weapon in her hands, and the right by which she claimed it; but the spirit of utter, selfless sacrifice that characterized her life was the means by which she mastered its immediate use.  For a kind of white and faultless intuition guided her to the attack.  Behind her stood her Bible and her God.

How so magnificent a divination came to her at all may well be a matter for astonishment, though some clue of explanation lies, perhaps, in the very simpleness of her nature.  At any rate, she saw quite clearly certain things; saw them in moments only—­after prayer, in the still silence of the night, or when left alone those long hours in the house with her knitting and her thoughts—­and the guidance which then flashed into her remained, even after the manner of its coming was forgotten.

They came to her, these things she saw, formless, wordless; she could not put them into any kind of language; but by the very fact of being uncaught in sentences they retained their original clear vigor.

Hours of patient waiting brought the first, and the others followed easily afterwards, by degrees, on subsequent days, a little and a little.  Her husband had been gone since early morning, and had taken his luncheon with him.  She was sitting by the tea things, the cups and teapot warmed, the muffins in the fender keeping hot, all ready for his return, when she realized quite abruptly that this thing which took him off, which kept him out so many hours day after day, this thing that was against her own little will and instincts—­was enormous as the sea.  It was no mere prettiness of single Trees, but something massed and mountainous.  About her rose the wall of its huge opposition to the sky, its scale gigantic, its power utterly prodigious.  What she knew of it hitherto as green and delicate forms waving and rustling in the winds was but, as it were the spray of foam that broke into sight upon the nearer edge of viewless depths far, far away.  The trees, indeed, were sentinels set visibly about the limits of a camp that itself remained invisible.  The awful hum and murmur of the main body in the distance passed into that still room about her with the firelight and hissing kettle.  Out yonder—­in the Forest further out—­the thing that was ever roaring at the center was dreadfully increasing.