"I didn't mean to be rude to you just now," she said abruptly.

"And that's the worst of it," replied the man of letters, "for I'm
horribly afraid I did mean to be rude to you. When I looked up
and saw you up there something surged up in me that was in all
the revolutions of history. Oh, there was admiration in it too!
Perhaps there was idolatry in all the iconoclasts."

He seemed to have a power of reaching rather intimate conversation
in one silent and cat-like bound, as he had scaled the steep road,
and it made her feel him to be dangerous, and perhaps unscrupulous.
She changed the subject sharply, not without it movement toward
gratifying her own curiosity.

"What DID you mean by all that about walking trees?" she asked.
"Don't tell me you really believe in a magic tree that eats birds!"

"I should probably surprise you," said Treherne gravely,
"more by what I don't believe than by what I do."

Then, after a pause, he made a general gesture toward
the house and garden. "I'm afraid I don't believe in all this;
for instance, in Elizabethan houses and Elizabethan families
and the way estates have been improved, and the rest of it.
Look at our friend the woodcutter now." And he pointed to the man
with the quaint black beard, who was still plying his ax upon
the timber below.

"That man's family goes back for ages, and it was far richer