to conduct
us perpetually to this tree. It 's the only dead one here.'

He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branches
decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the
small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass.
It was very witch-like, of a witch in her incantation-smoke.

'Not a single bare spot! but dead, dead as any peeled and fallen!' said
Alvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen. 'This is a tree for
a melancholy poet--eh, Clotilde?--for him to come on it by moonlight,
after a scene with his mistress, or tales of her! By the way and by the
way, my fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind of
garb for me, should I be ordered off the first to join the dusky
army below. Women who put on their dead husbands in public are not
well-mannered women, though they may be excellent professional widows,
excellent!'

He snapped the lichen-dust from his fingers, observing that he was
not sure the contrast of the flourishing and blighted was not more
impressive in sunlight: and then he looked from the tree to his true
love's hair. The tree at a little distance seemed run over with sunless
lizards: her locks were golden serpents.

'Shall I soon see your baroness?' Clotilde asked him.

'Not in advance of the ceremony,' he answered. 'In good time. You
understand--an old friend making room for a new one, and that one young
and beautiful, with golden tresses; at first...! But her heart is
quite sound. Have no fear! I guarantee it; I know her to the roots.
She desires my welfare, she does my behests. If I am bound to her by
gratitude, so, and in a greater degree, is she to me. The utmost she
will demand is that my bride shall be worthy of me--a good mate for me
in the fight to come; and I have tested my bride and found her half my
heart; therefore she passes the examination with the baroness.'

They left the tree behind them.

'We will take good care not to return this way again,' said Alvan,
without looking back. 'That tree belongs to a plantation of the under
world; its fellows grow in the wood across Acheron, and that tree has
looked into the ghastliness of the flood and seen itself. Hecate and
Hermes know about it. Phoebus cannot light it. That tree stands for
Death blooming. We think it sinister, but down there it is a homely
tree. Down there! When do we go? The shudder in that tree is the air
exchanging between Life and Death--the g