could face the thing, argue it away, or pray it into silence, she found
the thought of him running swiftly through her mind like a thought of
the Forest itself, the two most intimately linked and joined together,
each a part and complement of the other, one being.

The idea was too dim for her to see it face to face. Its mere
possibility dissolved the instant she focused it to get the truth behind
it. It was too utterly elusive, made, protæan. Under the attack of even
a minute's concentration the very meaning of it vanished, melted away.
The idea lay really behind any words that she could ever find, beyond
the touch of definite thought.

Her mind was unable to grapple with it. But, while it vanished, the
trail of its approach and disappearance flickered a moment before her
shaking vision. The horror certainly remained.

Reduced to the simple human statement that her temperament sought
instinctively, it stood perhaps at this: Her husband loved her, and he
loved the trees as well; but the trees came first, claimed parts of him
she did not know. _She_ loved her God and him. _He_ loved the trees
and her.

Thus, in guise of some faint, distressing compromise, the matter shaped
itself for her perplexed mind in the terms of conflict. A silent, hidden
battle raged, but as yet raged far away. The breaking of the cedar was a
visible outward fragment of a distant and mysterious encounter that was
coming daily closer to them both. The wind, instead of roaring in the
Forest further out, now cam nearer, booming in fitful gusts about its
edge and frontiers.