So foreign to her temperament were such thoughts, and so alien to all she had been taught to look for in Nature, that she strove against them.  She made an effort to oppose.  But they clung and haunted just the same; they refused to be dispersed.  The curtain hung dense and heavy as though its texture thickened.  The air with difficulty came through.

And then she thought that curtain stirred.  There was movement somewhere.  That obscure dim thing which ever broods behind the visible appearances of trees came nearer to her.  She caught her breath and stared about her, listening intently.  The trees, perhaps because she saw them more in detail now, it seemed to her had changed.  A vague, faint alteration spread over them, at first so slight she scarcely would admit it, then growing steadily, though still obscurely, outwards.  “They tremble and are changed,” flashed through her mind the horrid line that Sanderson had quoted.  Yet the change was graceful for all the uncouthness attendant upon the size of so vast a movement.  They had turned in her direction.  That was it. They saw her. In this way the change expressed itself in her groping, terrified thought.  Till now it had been otherwise:  she had looked at them from her own point of view; now they looked at her from theirs.  They stared her in the face and eyes; they stared at her all over.  In some unkind, resentful, hostile way, they watched her.  Hitherto in life she had watched them variously, in superficial ways, reading into them what her own mind suggested.  Now they read into her the things they actually were, and not merely another’s interpretations of them.

They seemed in their motionless silence there instinct with life, a life, moreover, that breathed about her a species of terrible soft enchantment that bewitched.  It branched all through her, climbing to the brain.  The Forest held her with its huge and giant fascination.  In this secluded breathing spot that the centuries had left untouched, she had stepped close against the hidden pulse of the whole collective mass of them.  They were aware of her and had turned to gaze with their myriad, vast sight upon the intruder.  They shouted at her in the silence.  For she wanted to look back at them, but it was like staring at a crowd, and her glance merely shifted from one tree to another, hurriedly, finding in none the one she sought.  They saw her so easily, each and all.  The rows that stood behind her also stared.  But she could not return the gaze.  Her husband, she realized, could.  And their steady stare shocked her as though in some sense she knew that she was naked.  They saw so much of her:  she saw of them—­so little.

Her efforts to return their gaze were pitiful.  The constant shifting increased her bewilderment.  Conscious of this awful and enormous sight all over her, she let her eyes first rest upon the ground, and then she closed them altogether.  She kept the lids as tight together as ever they would go.