manage, or effects of wind in foliage, but as a rule he left these all
severely alone. He kept to trees, wisely following an instinct that was
guided by love. It was quite arresting, this way he had of making a tree
look almost like a being--alive. It approached the uncanny.

"Yes, Sanderson knows what he's doing when he paints a tree!" thought
old David Bittacy, C.B., late of the Woods and Forests. "Why, you can
almost hear it rustle. You can smell the thing. You can hear the rain
drip through its leaves. You can almost see the branches move. It
grows." For in this way somewhat he expressed his satisfaction, half to
persuade himself that the twenty guineas were well spent (since his wife
thought otherwise), and half to explain this uncanny reality of life
that lay in the fine old cedar framed above his study table.

Yet in the general view the mind of Mr. Bittacy was held to be austere,
not to say morose. Few divined in him the secretly tenacious love of
nature that had been fostered by years spent in the forests and jungles
of the eastern world. It was odd for an Englishman, due possibly to that
Eurasian ancestor. Surreptitiously, as though half ashamed of it, he had
kept alive a sense of beauty that hardly belonged to his type, and was
unusual for its vitality. Trees, in particular, nourished it. He, also,
understood trees, felt a subtle sense of communion with them, born
perhaps of those years he had lived in caring for them, guarding,
protecting, nursing, years of solitude among their great shadowy
presences. He kept it largely to himself, of course, because he knew the
world he lived in. HE also kept it from his wife--to some extent. He
knew it came between them, knew that she feared it, was opposed. But
what he did not know, or realize at any rate, was the extent to which
she grasped the power which they wielded over his life. Her fear, he
judged, was simply due to those years in India, when for weeks at a time