life in the most feeble fashion. At the same time she lost sight, too,
of that brilliant picture at the exist of the tunnel; it faded away into
a tiny semicircle of pale light, the violet sea and the sunshine the
merest point of white, remote as a star and equally inaccessible. She
knew now that she could never reach it. And through the darkness that
stretched behind, the power of the trees came close and caught her,
twining about her feet and arms, climbing to her very lips. She woke at
night, finding it difficult to breathe. There seemed wet leaves pressing
against her mouth, and soft green tendrils clinging to her neck. Her
feet were heavy, half rooted, as it were, in deep, thick earth. Huge
creepers stretched along the whole of that black tunnel, feeling about
her person for points where they might fasten well, as ivy or the giant
parasites of the Vegetable Kingdom settle down on the trees themselves
to sap their life and kill them.

Slowly and surely the morbid growth possessed her life and held her. She
feared those very winds that ran about the wintry forest. They were in
league with it. They helped it everywhere.

"Why don't you sleep, dear?" It was her husband now who played the rôle
of nurse, tending her little wants with an honest care that at least
aped the services of love. He was so utterly unconscious of the raging
battle he had caused. "What is it keeps you so wide awake and restless?"

"The winds," she whispered in the dark. For hours she had been watching
the tossing of the trees through the blindless windows. "They go walking
and talking everywhere to-night, keeping me awake. And all the time they
call so loudly to you."

And his strange whispered answer appalled her for a moment until the