Once more she struggled to her feet, and this time turned successfully and slowly made her way along the mossy glade by which she came.  And at first she marveled, though only for a moment, at the ease with which she found the path.  For a moment only, because almost at once she saw the truth.  The trees were glad that she should go.  They helped her on her way.  The Forest did not want her.

The tide was coming in, indeed, yet not for her.

And so, in another of those flashes of clear-vision that of late had lifted life above the normal level, she saw and understood the whole terrible thing complete.

Till now, though unexpressed in thought or language, her fear had been that the woods her husband loved would somehow take him from her—­to merge his life in theirs—­even to kill him on some mysterious way.  This time she saw her deep mistake, and so seeing, let in upon herself the fuller agony of horror.  For their jealousy was not the petty jealousy of animals or humans.  They wanted him because they loved him, but they did _ not_ want him dead.  Full charged with his splendid life and enthusiasm they wanted him.  They wanted him—­alive.

It was she who stood in their way, and it was she whom they intended to remove.

This was what brought the sense of abject helplessness.  She stood upon the sands against an entire ocean slowly rolling in against her.  For, as all the forces of a human being combine unconsciously to eject a grain of sand that has crept beneath the skin to cause discomfort, so the entire mass of what Sanderson had called the Collective Consciousness of the Forest strove to eject this human atom that stood across the path of its desire.  Loving her husband, she had crept beneath its skin.  It was her they would eject and take away; it was her they would destroy, not him.  Him, whom they loved and needed, they would keep alive.  They meant to take him living.  She reached the house in safety, though she never remembered how she found her way.  It was made all simple for her.  The branches almost urged her out.

But behind her, as she left the shadowed precincts, she felt as though some towering Angel of the Woods let fall across the threshold the flaming sword of a countless multitude of leaves that formed behind her a barrier, green, shimmering, and impassable.  Into the Forest she never walked again.

And she went about her daily duties with a calm and quietness that was a perpetual astonishment even to herself, for it hardly seemed of this world at all.  She talked to her husband when he came in for tea—­after dark.  Resignation brings a curious large courage—­when there is nothing more to lose.  The soul takes risks, and dares.  Is it a curious short-cut sometimes to the heights?

“David, I went into the Forest, too, this morning, soon after you I went.  I saw you there.”

“Wasn’t it wonderful?” he answered simply, inclining his head a little.  There was no surprise or annoyance in his look; a mild and gentle ennui rather.  He asked no real question.  She thought of some garden tree the wind attacks too suddenly, bending it over when it does not want to bend—­the mild unwillingness with which it yields.  She often saw him this way now, in the terms of trees.