“A moment since something went past me through the air of the room.  Back to the night outside it went.”  Her voice, too, held the same note as of wind entangled among too many leaves.

“My dear, it was the wind.”

“But it called, David.  It was calling you—­by name!”

“The air of the branches, dear, was what you heard.  Now, sleep again, I beg you, sleep.”

“It had a crowd of eyes all through and over it—­before and behind—­” Her voice grew louder.  But his own in reply sank lower, far away, and oddly hushed.

“The moonlight, dear, upon the sea of twigs and boughs in the rain, was what you saw.”

“But it frightened me.  I’ve lost my God—­and you—­I’m cold as death!”

“My dear, it is the cold of the early morning hours.  The whole world sleeps.  Now sleep again yourself.”

He whispered close to her ear.  She felt his hand stroking her.  His voice was soft and very soothing.  But only a part of him was there; only a part of him was speaking; it was a half-emptied body that lay beside her and uttered these strange sentences, even forcing her own singular choice of words.  The horrible, dim enchantment of the trees was close about them in the room—­gnarled, ancient, lonely trees of winter, whispering round the human life they loved.

“And let me sleep again,” she heard him murmur as he settled down among the clothes, “sleep back into that deep, delicious peace from which you called me.”

His dreamy, happy tone, and that look of youth and joy she discerned upon his features even in the filtered moonlight, touched her again as with the spell of those shining, mild green presences.  It sank down into her.  She felt sleep grope for her.  On the threshold of slumber one of those strange vagrant voices that loss of consciousness lets loose cried faintly in her heart—­

“There is joy in the Forest over one sinner that—­”

Then sleep took her before she had time to realize even that she was vilely parodying one of her most precious texts, and that the irreverence was ghastly.

And though she quickly slept again, her sleep was not as usual, dreamless.  It was not woods and trees she dreamed of, but a small and curious dream that kept coming again and again upon her; that she stood upon a wee, bare rock I the sea, and that the tide was rising.  The water first came to her feet, then to her knees, then to her waist.  Each time the dream returned, the tide seemed higher.  Once it rose to her neck, once even to her mouth, covering her lips for a moment so that she could not breathe.  She did not wake between the dreams; a period of drab and dreamless slumber intervened.  But, finally, the water rose above her eyes and face, completely covering her head.

And then came explanation—­the sort of explanation dreams bring.  She understood.  For, beneath the water, she had seen the world of seaweed rising from the bottom of the sea like a forest of dense green-long, sinuous stems, immense thick branches, millions of feelers spreading through the darkened watery depths the power of their ocean foliage.  The Vegetable Kingdom was even in the sea.  It was everywhere.  Earth, air, and water helped it, way of escape there was none.