fascinate or horrify, and she could read her power mirrored in their
eyes. Even the half-abstracted indifference of her strange host had been
something. But she was alone now. Her words fell on apathetic solitude;
she was acting to viewless space. She rushed to the opening, dashed the
hanging bark aside, and leaped to the ground.

She ran forward wildly a few steps, and stopped.

"Hallo!" she cried. "Look, 'tis I, Teresa!"

The profound silence remained unbroken. Her shrillest tones were lost
in an echoless space, even as the smoke of her fire had faded into pure
ether. She stretched out her clenched fists as if to defy the pillared
austerities of the vaults around her.

"Come and take me if you dare!"

The challenge was unheeded. If she had thrown herself violently against
the nearest tree-trunk, she could not have been stricken more breathless
than she was by the compact, embattled solitude that encompassed her.
The hopelessness of impressing these cold and passive vaults with
her selfish passion filled her with a vague fear. In her rage of the
previous night she had not seen the wood in its profound immobility.
Left alone with the majesty of those enormous columns, she trembled and
turned faint. The silence of the hollow tree she had just quitted seemed
to her less awful than the crushing presence of these mute and monstrous
witnesses of her weakness. Like a wounded quail with lowered crest and
trailing wing, she crept back to her hiding place.

Even then the influence of the wood was still upon her. She picked up