To inquire concerning his health had been to
show less sympathy than to remain silent, considering the material
interest he possessed in the woodman's life, and he had, accordingly,
made a point of avoiding Marty's house.

While he was here in the garden somebody came to fetch him. It was
Marty herself, and she showed her distress by her unconsciousness of a
cropped poll.

"Father is still so much troubled in his mind about that tree," she
said. "You know the tree I mean, Mr. Winterborne? the tall one in
front of the house, that he thinks will blow down and kill us. Can you
come and see if you can persuade him out of his notion? I can do
nothing."

He accompanied her to the cottage, and she conducted him upstairs.
John South was pillowed up in a chair between the bed and the window
exactly opposite the latter, towards which his face was turned.

"Ah, neighbor Winterborne," he said. "I wouldn't have minded if my
life had only been my own to lose; I don't vallie it in much of itself,
and can let it go if 'tis required of me. But to think what 'tis worth
to you, a young man rising in life, that do trouble me! It seems a
trick of dishonesty towards ye to go off at fifty-five! I could bear
up, I know I could, if it were not for the tree--yes, the tree, 'tis
that's killing me. There he stands, threatening my life every minute
that the wind do blow. He'll come down upon us and squat us dead; and
what will ye do when the life on your property is taken away?"

"Never you mind me--that's of no consequence," said Giles. "Think of
yourself alone."

He looked out of the window in the direction of the woodman's gaze.
The tree was a tall elm, familiar to him from childhood, which stood at
a distance of two-thirds its own height from the front of South's
dwelling. Whenever the wind blew, as it did now, the tree rocked,
naturally enough; and the sight of its motion and sound of its sighs
had gradually bred the terrifying illusion in the woodman's mind that
it would descend and kill him. Thus he would sit all day, in spite of
persuasion, watching its every sway, and listening to the melancholy
Gregorian melodies which the air wrung out of it. This fear it
apparently was, rather than any organic disease which was eating away
the health of John South.

As the tree waved, South waved his head, making it his flugel-man with
abject obedience. "Ah, when it was quite a small tree," he said, "and
I was a little boy, I though