She made an effort to oppose. But they clung and haunted just the same;
they refused to be dispersed. The curtain hung dense and heavy as though
its texture thickened. The air with difficulty came through.

And then she thought that curtain stirred. There was movement somewhere.
That obscure dim thing which ever broods behind the visible appearances
of trees came nearer to her. She caught her breath and stared about her,
listening intently. The trees, perhaps because she saw them more in
detail now, it seemed to her had changed. A vague, faint alteration
spread over them, at first so slight she scarcely would admit it, then
growing steadily, though still obscurely, outwards. "They tremble and
are changed," flashed through her mind the horrid line that Sanderson
had quoted. Yet the change was graceful for all the uncouthness
attendant upon the size of so vast a movement. They had turned in her
direction. That was it. _They saw her._ In this way the change
expressed itself in her groping, terrified thought. Till now it had been
otherwise: she had looked at them from her own point of view; now they
looked at her from theirs. They stared her in the face and eyes; they
stared at her all over. In some unkind, resentful, hostile way, they
watched her. Hitherto in life she had watched them variously, in
superficial ways, reading into them what her own mind suggested. Now
they read into her the things they actually _were_, and not merely
another's interpretations of them.

They seemed in their motionless silence there instinct with life, a
life, moreover, that breathed about her a species of terrible soft
enchantment that bewitched. It branched all through her, climbing to the
brain. The Forest held her with its huge and giant fascination. In this
secluded breathing spot that the centuries had left untouched, she had
stepped close against the hidden pulse of the whole collective mass of