It was curious, this instinctive aversion she felt to being shut in--by
trees especially; a kind of claustrophobia almost; probably due, as has
been said, to the days in India when the trees took her husband off and
surrounded him with dangers. In those weeks of solitude the feeling had
matured. She had fought it in her fashion, but never conquered it.
Apparently routed, it had a way of creeping back in other forms. In this
particular case, yielding to his strong desire, she thought the battle
won, but the terror of the trees came back before the first month had
passed. They laughed in her face.

She never lost 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