ost knowledge of the fact that the leagues of forest lay
about their cottage like a mighty wall, a crowding, watching, listening
presence that shut them in from freedom and escape. Far from morbid
naturally, she did her best to deny the thought, and so simple and
unartificial was her type of mind that for weeks together she would
wholly lose it. Then, suddenly it would return upon her with a rush of
bleak reality. It was not only in her mind; it existed apart from any
mere mood; a separate fear that walked alone; it came and went, yet when
it went--went only to watch her from another point of view. It was in
abeyance--hidden round the corner.

The Forest never let her go completely. It was ever ready to encroach.
All the branches, she sometimes fancied, stretched one way--towards
their tiny cottage and garden, as though it sought to draw them in and
merge them in itself. Its great, deep-breathing soul resented the
mockery, the insolence, the irritation of the prim garden at its very
gates. It would absorb and smother them if it could. And every wind that
blew its thundering message over the huge sounding-board of the million,
shaking trees conveyed the purpose that it had. They had angered its
great soul. At its heart was this deep, incessant roaring.

All this she never framed in words, the subtleties of language lay far
beyond her reach. But instinctively she felt it; and more besides. It
troubled her profoundly. Chiefly, moreover, for her husband. Merely for
herself, the nightmare might have left her cold. It was David's peculiar
interest in the trees that gave the special invitation. Jealousy, then,
in its most subtle aspect came to strengthen this aversion and dislike,
for it came in a form that no reasonable wife could possibly object to.
Her husband's passion, she reflected, was natural and inborn. It had
decided his vocation, fed his ambition, nourished his dreams, desires,
hopes. All his best years of active life had been spent in the care and
guardianship of trees. He knew them, understood their secret life and
nature, "managed" them intuitively as other men "managed" dogs and
horses. He could not live for long away from them without a strange,
acute nostalgia that stole his peace of mind and consequently his
strength of body. A forest made him happy and at peace; it nursed and
fed and soothed his deepest moods. Trees influenced the sources of his
life, lowered or raised the very heart-beat in him. Cut off fro