The air was very still, the sky a cold pale blue, but cloudless.  The entire Forest stood silent, at attention.  It knew perfectly well that she had come.  It knew the moment when she entered; watched and followed her; and behind her something dropped without a sound and shut her in.  Her feet upon the glades of mossy grass fell silently, as the oaks and beeches shifted past in rows and took up their positions at her back.  It was not pleasant, this way they grew so dense behind her the instant she had passed.  She realized that they gathered in an ever-growing army, massed, herded, trooped, between her and the cottage, shutting off escape.  They let her pass so easily, but to get out again she would know them differently—­thick, crowded, branches all drawn and hostile.  Already their increasing numbers bewildered her.  In front, they looked so sparse and scattered, with open spaces where the sunshine fell; but when she turned it seemed they stood so close together, a serried army, darkening the sunlight.  They blocked the day, collected all the shadows, stood with their leafless and forbidding rampart like the night.  They swallowed down into themselves the very glade by which she came.  For when she glanced behind her—­rarely—­the way she had come was shadowy and lost.

Yet the morning sparkled overhead, and a glance of excitement ran quivering through the entire day.  It was what she always knew as “children’s weather,” so clear and harmless, without a sign of danger, nothing ominous to threaten or alarm.  Steadfast in her purpose, looking back as little as she dared, Sophia Bittacy marched slowly and deliberately into the heart of the silent woods, deeper, ever deeper.

And then, abruptly, in an open space where the sunshine fell unhindered, she stopped.  It was one of the breathing places of the forest.  Dead, withered bracken lay in patches of unsightly grey.  There were bits of heather too.  All round the trees stood looking on—­oak, beech, holly, ash, pine, larch, with here and there small groups of juniper.  On the lips of this breathing space of the woods she stopped to rest, disobeying her instinct for the first time.  For the other instinct in her was to go on.  She did not really want to rest.

This was the little act that brought it to her—­the wireless message from a vast Emitter.

“I’ve been stopped,” she thought to herself with a horrid qualm.

She looked about her in this quiet, ancient place.  Nothing stirred.  There was no life nor sign of life; no birds sang; no rabbits scuttled off at her approach.  The stillness was bewildering, and gravity hung down upon it like a heavy curtain.  It hushed the heart in her.  Could this be part of what her husband felt—­this sense of thick entanglement with stems, boughs, roots, and foliage?

“This has always been as it is now,” she thought, yet not knowing why she thought it.  “Ever since the Forest grew it has been still and secret here.  It has never changed.”  The curtain of silence drew closer while she said it, thickening round her.  “For a thousand years—­I’m here with a thousand years.  And behind this place stand all the forests of the world!”