without disguise. And, while she trembled at his energy, she admired the
virile passion he displayed. Her jealousy had long ago retired before
her fear, accepting the second place. Her one desire now was to protect.
The wife turned wholly mother.

He said so little, but--he hated to come in. From morning to night he
wandered in the Forest; often he went out after dinner; his mind was
charged with trees--their foliage, growth, development; their wonder,
beauty, strength; their loneliness in isolation, their power in a herded
mass. He knew the effect of every wind upon them; the danger from the
boisterous north, the glory from the west, the eastern dryness, and the
soft, moist tenderness that a south wind left upon their thinning
boughs. He spoke all day of their sensations: how they drank the fading
sunshine, dreamed in the moonlight, thrilled to the kiss of stars. The
dew could bring them half the passion of the night, but frost sent them
plunging beneath the ground to dwell with hopes of a later coming
softness in their roots. They nursed the life they carried--insects,
larvae, chrysalis--and when the skies above them melted, he spoke of
them standing "motionless in an ecstasy of rain," or in the noon of
sunshine "self-poised upon their prodigy of shade."

And once in the middle of the night she woke at the sound of his voice,
and heard him--wide awake, not talking in his sleep--but talking towards
the window where the shadow of the cedar fell at noon:

O art thou sighing for Lebanon
In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East?
Sighing for Lebanon,
Dark cedar;