undings 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.

Hitherto she had divided the beyond-world into two sharp halves--spirits
good or spirits evil. But thoughts came to her now, on soft and very
tentative feet, like the footsteps of the gods which are on wool, that
besides these definite classes, the