"Well, the two tales are reconcilable enough," put in the poet quietly.
"If there were a magic that killed men when they came close,
it's likely to strike them with sickness when they stand far off.
In the old romance the dragon, that devours people, often blasts
others with a sort of poisonous breath."

Ashe looked across at the speaker steadily, not to say stonily.

"Do I understand," he inquired, "that you swallow the
swallowing trees too?"

Treherne's dark smile was still on the defensive; his fencing always
annoyed the other, and he seemed not without malice in the matter.

"Swallowing is a metaphor," he said, "about me, if not about the trees.
And metaphors take us at once into dreamland--no bad place, either.
This garden, I think, gets more and more like a dream at this corner
of the day and night, that might lead us anywhere."

The yellow horn of the moon had appeared silently and as if
suddenly over the black horns of the seaweed, seeming to
announce as night something which till then had been evening.
A night breeze came in between the trees and raced stealthily
across the turf, and as they ceased speaking they heard,
not only the seething grass, but the sea itself move and sound
in all the cracks and caves round them and below them and on
every side. They all felt the note that had been struck--
the American as an art critic and the poet as a poet;
and the Squire, who believed himself boiling with an impatience
purely rational, did not really understand his own impatience.