awake. All strength or desire to resist had gone for good. The thing
against her was too huge and powerful. Capitulation was complete, a fact
accomplished. She dated it from the day she followed him to the Forest.

Moreover, the time for evacuation--her own evacuation--seemed
approaching. It came stealthily ever nearer, surely and slowly as the
rising tide she used to dread. At the high-water mark she stood waiting
calmly--waiting to be swept away. Across the lawn all those terrible
days of early winter the encircling Forest watched it come, guiding its
silent swell and currents towards her feet. Only she never once gave up
her Bible or her praying. This complete resignation, moreover, had
somehow brought to her a strange great understanding, and if she could
not share her husband's horrible abandonment to powers outside himself,
she could, and did, in some half-groping way grasp at shadowy meanings
that might make such abandonment--possible, yes, but more than merely
possible--in some extraordinary sense not evil.

Hitherto she had divided the beyond-world into two sharp halves--spirits
good or spirits evil. But thoughts came to her now, on soft and very
tentative feet, like the footsteps of the gods which are on wool, that
besides these definite classes, there might be other Powers as well,
belonging definitely to neither one nor other. Her thought stopped dead
at that. But the big idea found lodgment in her little mind, and, owing
to the largeness of her heart, remained there unejected. It even brought
a certain solace with it.

The failure--or unwillingness, as she preferred to state it--of her God
to interfere and help, that also she came in a measure to understand.
For here, she found it more and more possible to imagine, was perhaps no
positive evil at work, but only something that usually stands away from