The sense of definite battle, too—­battle between herself and the Forest for his soul—­came with it.  Its presentiment was as clear as though Thompson had come into the room and quietly told her that the cottage was surrounded.  “Please, ma’am, there are trees come up about the house,” she might have suddenly announced.  And equally might have heard her own answer:  “It’s all right, Thompson.  The main body is still far away.”

Immediately upon its heels, then, came another truth, with a close reality that shocked her.  She saw that jealousy was not confined to the human and animal world alone, but ran though all creation.  The Vegetable Kingdom knew it too.  So-called inanimate nature shared it with the rest.  Trees felt it.  This Forest just beyond the window—­standing there in the silence of the autumn evening across the little lawn—­this Forest understood it equally.  The remorseless, branching power that sought to keep exclusively for itself the thing it loved and needed, spread like a running desire through all its million leaves and stems and roots.  In humans, of course, it was consciously directed; in animals it acted with frank instinctiveness; but in trees this jealousy rose in some blind tide of impersonal and unconscious wrath that would sweep opposition from its path as the wind sweeps powdered snow from the surface of the ice.  Their number was a host with endless reinforcements, and once it realized its passion was returned the power increased....  Her husband loved the trees....  They had become aware of it....  They would take him from her in the end....

Then, while she heard his footsteps in the hall and the closing of the front door, she saw a third thing clearly;—­realized the widening of the gap between herself and him.  This other love had made it.  All these weeks of the summer when she felt so close to him, now especially when she had made the biggest sacrifice of her life to stay by his side and help him, he had been slowly, surely—­drawing away.  The estrangement was here and now—­a fact accomplished.  It had been all this time maturing; there yawned this broad deep space between them.  Across the empty distance she saw the change in merciless perspective.  It revealed his face and figure, dearly-loved, once fondly worshipped, far on the other side in shadowy distance, small, the back turned from her, and moving while she watched—­moving away from her.

They had their tea in silence then.  She asked no questions, he volunteered no information of his day.  The heart was big within her, and the terrible loneliness of age spread through her like a rising icy mist.  She watched him, filling all his wants.  His hair was untidy and his boots were caked with blackish mud.  He moved with a restless, swaying motion that somehow blanched her cheek and sent a miserable shivering down her back.  It reminded her of trees.  His eyes were very bright.

He brought in with him an odor of the earth and forest that seemed to choke her and make it difficult to breathe; and—­what she noticed with a climax of almost uncontrollable alarm—­upon his face beneath the lamplight shone traces of a mild, faint glory that made her think of moonlight falling upon a wood through speckled shadows.  It was his new-found happiness that shone there, a happiness uncaused by her and in which she had no part.