her very lips.  She woke at night, finding it difficult to breathe.  There seemed wet leaves pressing against her mouth, and soft green tendrils clinging to her neck.  Her feet were heavy, half rooted, as it were, in deep, thick earth.  Huge creepers stretched along the whole of that black tunnel, feeling about her person for points where they might fasten well, as ivy or the giant parasites of the Vegetable Kingdom settle down on the trees themselves to sap their life and kill them.

Slowly and surely the morbid growth possessed her life and held her.  She feared those very winds that ran about the wintry forest.  They were in league with it.  They helped it everywhere.

“Why don’t you sleep, dear?” It was her husband now who played the role of nurse, tending her little wants with an honest care that at least aped the services of love.  He was so utterly unconscious of the raging battle he had caused.  “What is it keeps you so wide awake and restless?”

“The winds,” she whispered in the dark.  For hours she had been watching the tossing of the trees through the blindless windows.  “They go walking and talking everywhere to-night, keeping me awake.  And all the time they call so loudly to you.”

And his strange whispered answer appalled her for a moment until the meaning of it faded and left her in a dark confusion of the mind that was now becoming almost permanent.

“The trees excite them in the night.  The winds are the great swift carriers.  Go with them, dear—­and not against.  You’ll find sleep that way if you do.”

“The storm is rising,” she began, hardly knowing what she said.

“All the more then—­go with them.  Don’t resist.  They’ll take you to the trees, that’s all.”

Resist!  The word touched on the button of some text that once had helped her.

“Resist the devil and he will flee from you,” she heard her whispered answer, and the same second had buried her face beneath the clothes in a flood of hysterical weeping.

But her husband did not seem disturbed.  Perhaps he did not hear it, for the wind ran just then against the windows with a booming shout, and the roaring of the Forest farther out came behind the blow, surging into the room.  Perhaps, too, he was already asleep again.  She slowly regained a sort of dull composure.  Her face emerged from the tangle of sheets and blankets.  With a growing terror over her—­she listened.  The storm was rising.  It came with a sudden and impetuous rush that made all further sleep for her impossible.

Alone in a shaking world, it seemed, she lay and listened.  That storm interpreted for her mind the climax.  The Forest bellowed out its victory to the winds; the winds in turn proclaimed it to the Night.  The whole world knew of her complete defeat, her loss, her little human pain.  This was the roar and shout of victory that she listened to.