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.

And even underneath the sea she heard that terrible sound of
roaring--was it surf or wind or voices?--further out, yet coming
steadily towards her.

And so, in the loneliness of that drab English winter, the mind of Mrs.
Bittacy, preying upon itself, and fed by constant dread, went lost in
disproportion. Dreariness filled the weeks with dismal, sunless skies
and a cling