great soul. At its heart was this deep, incessant roaring.

All this she never framed in words, the subtleties of language lay far
beyond her reach. But instinctively she felt it; and more besides. It
troubled her profoundly. Chiefly, moreover, for her husband. Merely for
herself, the nightmare might have left her cold. It was David's peculiar
interest in the trees that gave the special invitation. Jealousy, then,
in its most subtle aspect came to strengthen this aversion and dislike,
for it came in a form that no reasonable wife could possibly object to.
Her husband's passion, she reflected, was natural and inborn. It had
decided his vocation, fed his ambition, nourished his dreams, desires,
hopes. All his best years of active life had been spent in the care and
guardianship of trees. He knew them, understood their secret life and
nature, "managed" them intuitively as other men "managed" dogs and
horses. He could not live for long away from them without a strange,
acute nostalgia that stole his peace of mind and consequently his
strength of body. A forest made him happy and at peace; it nursed and
fed and soothed his deepest moods. Trees influenced the sources of his
life, lowered or raised the very heart-beat in him. Cut off from them he
languished as a lover of the sea can droop inland, or a mountaineer may
pine in the flat monotony of the plains.

This she could understand, in a fashion at least, and make allowances
for. She had yielded gently, even sweetly, to his choice of their
English home; for in the little island there is nothing that suggests
the woods of wilder countries so nearly as the New Forest. It has the
genuine air and mystery, the depth and splendor, the loneliness, and
there and there the strong, untamable quality of old-time forests as
Bittacy of the Department knew them.