unfed since the first meal of the day; it was dark three hours before he
was up into the high wood. He met no one during all these miles, and his
body and his mind were lonely; he hoped to press on and be at his
father's door before two in the morning or perhaps at one. The night was
so still that he heard no noise in the high wood, not even the rustling
of a leaf or a twig crackling, and no animal ran in the undergrowth. The
moss of the ride was silent under his heavy tread, but now and then the
steel of his side-arm clicked against a metal button of the great cloak
he wore. This sharp sound made him so conscious of himself that he
seemed to fill that forest with his own presence and to be all that was,
there or elsewhere. He was in a mood of unreal and not holy things. The
mood, remaining, changed its aspect, and now he was so far from alone
that all the trunks around him and the glimmers of sky between bare
boughs held each a spirit of its own, and with the powerful imagination
of the unlearned he could have spoken and held communion with the trees;
but it would have an evil communion, for he felt this mood of his take
on a further phase as he went deeper and deeper still into these
forests. He felt about him uneasily the sense of doom. He was in that
exaltation of fancy or dream when faint appeals are half heard far off,
but not by our human ears, and when whatever attempts to pierce the
armour of our mortality appeals to us by wailing and by despairing
sighs. It seemed to him that most unhappy things passed near him in the
air, and that the wood about him was full of sobbing. Then, again, he
felt his own mind within him begin to be occupied by doubtful troubles
worse than these terrors, an anxious straining for ill news, for bitter
and dreadful news, mixed with a confused certitude that such news had
come indeed, disturbed and haunted him; and all the while about him in
that stillness the rushing of unhappy spirits went like a secret storm.
He was clouded with the mingled emotions of apprehension and of fatal
mourning; he attempted to remember the expectations that had failed him,