“It was very wonderful indeed, dear, yes,” she replied low, her voice not faltering though indistinct.  “But for me it was too—­too strange and big.”

The passion of tears lay just below the quiet voice all unbetrayed.  Somehow she kept them back.

There was a pause, and then he added: 

“I find it more and more so every day.”  His voice passed through the lamp-lit room like a murmur of the wind in branches.  The look of youth and happiness she had caught upon his face out there had wholly gone, and an expression of weariness was in its place, as of a man distressed vaguely at finding himself in uncongenial surroundings where he is slightly ill at ease.  It was the house he hated—­coming back to rooms and walls and furniture.  The ceilings and closed windows confined him.  Yet, in it, no suggestion that he found her irksome.  Her presence seemed of no account at all; indeed, he hardly noticed her.  For whole long periods he lost her, did not know that she was there.  He had no need of her.  He lived alone.  Each lived alone.

The outward signs by which she recognized that the awful battle was against her and the terms of surrender accepted were pathetic.  She put the medicine-chest away upon the shelf; she gave the orders for his pocket-luncheon before he asked; she went to bed alone and early, leaving the front door unlocked, with milk and bread and butter in the hall beside the lamp—­all concessions that she felt impelled to make.  Fore more and more, unless the weather was too violent, he went out after dinner even, staying for hours in the woods.  But she never slept until she heard the front door close below, and knew soon afterwards his careful step come creeping up the stairs and into the room so softly.  Until she heard his regular deep breathing close beside her, she lay awake.  All strength or desire to resist had gone for good.  The thing against her was too huge and powerful.  Capitulation was complete, a fact accomplished.  She dated it from the day she followed him to the Forest.

Moreover, the time for evacuation—­her own evacuation—­seemed approaching.  It came stealthily ever nearer, surely and slowly as the rising tide she used to dread.  At the high-water mark she stood waiting calmly—­waiting to be swept away.  Across the lawn all those terrible days of early winter the encircling Forest watched it come, guiding its silent swell and currents towards her feet.  Only she never once gave up her Bible or her praying.  This complete resignation, moreover, had somehow brought to her a strange great understanding, and if she could not share her husband’s horrible abandonment to powers outside himself, she could, and did, in some half-groping way grasp at shadowy meanings that might make such abandonment—­possible, yes, but more than merely possible—­in some extraordinary sense not evil.