She closed her eyes and passed her fingers searchingly across her brow,
as we sometimes instinctively try to brush away our cares. Then she
sat looking down rather pitifully at her palms, as they lay in her lap.

"You have shared your secret with me," she said, solemnly, at length.
"I'll share mine with yon. It is the only fear that I have ever felt
regarding our future. It has never left me; and what you have just
shown me fills me with terror."

I sat aghast.

"I am not deceived," she continued; "you have not forgotten nature. It
draws you more powerfully than anything else in the world. Whenever
you speak of it, you say the right thing, you find the right word, you
get the right meaning. With nature alone you are perfectly natural.
Towards society you show your shabby, awkward, trivial, uncomfortable
side. But these drawings, these notes--there lies your power, your
gift, your home. You truly belong to the woodsmen."

Never used to study myself, I listened, to this as to fresh talk about
a stranger.

"Do you not foresee what will happen?" she went on, with emotion.
"After we have been married a while you will begin to wander off--at
first for part of a day, then for a day, then for a day and a night,
then for days and nights together. That was the way with Audubon, that
was the way with Wilson, that is the way with Thoreau, that will be the
way with all whom nature draws as it draws you. And, me--think of
me--at home! A woman not able to go with you! Not able to wade the
creeks and swim the rivers! Not able to sleep out in the brown leaves,