“I asked you to tell me no facts,” she added.

“I’ll only tell you two,” persisted Mr. Russell.  “One is that they have in the church near the quarry a dark wooden figure of a saint, with the raised arm broken, and straight draperies.  I saw it, and they told me what I knew already, that it came out of the hall of a house that was drowned in the sea.  The other fact is a story that the tobacconist told me, about a wriggly ladder, and stone balls, and the Law.  In the tobacconist’s childhood they found the stone balls at the foot of the cliff in the sand.  That story, too, I knew already.  Quite apart from your letters, you little secret friend, I knew the face of that sea directly I saw it.”

“But how did you know?  How dared you know?”

“Oh well,” said Mr. Russell, “you asked me to tell you no facts.”

Mr. Russell was not observant.  He was not sufficiently alive to be observant.  He was much occupied in remembering phantom yesterdays, and I do not think he listened very much to what the ’bus-conductor said.  He only enjoyed the sound of her voice, which he remembered.  So he did not know that she was unhappy.

They came presently to a separate part of the forest, which is impaled upon a straight white road.  The earth beneath the trees was caught in a mesh of shadows.  The trees are high and vaulted there, but the forest is very reticent.  The detail of its making is so small that you can only see it if you lie down on your face.  Do this and you can see the green threads of the earth’s material woven across the skeletons of last year’s leaves.  You can see the little lawns of moss and weeds, too small to name, that make the way brilliant for the ants.  You can watch the heroic armoured beetles defying their world.  You can cover with a leaf the great open-air public meeting-places of six-legged things.  You can see the spiders at work on their silver cranes, you can watch the bold elevated activities of the caterpillars.  You can feel the scattered grasses stroke your eyelids, you can hear the low songs of fairies among the roots of the trees.  All these things you may enjoy if you lie down, but the forest does not show them to you.  The forest pays you the great compliment of ignoring you, and it does not care whether you see its intimate possessions or not.  I think perhaps no day is really unsuccessful that gives you forest earth against your forehead, and forest grass between your fingers, and high forest trees to stand between you and the ultimate confession of failure.

Jay and Mr. Russell boarded out Christina the motor car for the day at an inn, and then they sat and gradually introduced themselves to the forest.  Showers fell on their hatless heads, and they did not notice.  A mole rose like a submarine from the waves of the forest earth, and they did not notice.  The butterflies danced like little tunes in the sunlit clearing, and they did not notice.  And from a long way off, near the swings, holiday shrieks trailed along the wind, and they did not notice.