no notion of the cost of brushes, frames, paints, and canvases. Also she
forgave him much for the sake of his beautiful eyes and his eager
enthusiasm of manner. So many men of thirty were already blase.

Still, when the visit was over, she felt relieved. She said nothing
about his coming a second time, and her husband, she was glad to notice,
had likewise made no suggestion. For, truth to tell, the way the younger
man engrossed the older, keeping him out for hours in the Forest,
talking on the lawn in the blazing sun, and in the evenings when the
damp of dusk came creeping out from the surrounding woods, all
regardless of his age and usual habits, was not quite to her taste. Of
course, Mr. Sanderson did not know how easily those attacks of Indian
fever came back, but David surely might have told him.

They talked trees from morning to night. It stirred in her the old
subconscious trail of dread, a trail that led ever into the darkness of
big woods; and such feelings, as her early evangelical training taught
her, were temptings. To regard them in any other way was to play with
danger.

Her mind, as she watched these two, was charged with curious thoughts of
dread she could not understand, yet feared the more on that account. The
way they studied that old mangy cedar was a trifle unnecessary, unwise,
she felt. It was disregarding the sense of proportion which deity had
set upon the world for men's safe guidance.

Even after dinner they smoked their cigars upon the low branches that
swept down and touched the lawn, until at length she insisted on their
coming in. Cedars, she had somewhere heard, were not safe after sundown;
it was not wholesome to be too near them; to sleep beneath them was even