“Ah,” said Sanderson gently, “but there is ‘God’ in the trees.  God in a very subtle aspect and sometimes—­I have known the trees express it too—­that which is not God—­dark and terrible.  Have you ever noticed, too, how clearly trees show what they want—­choose their companions, at least?  How beeches, for instance, allow no life too near them—­birds or squirrels in their boughs, nor any growth beneath?  The silence in the beech wood is quite terrifying often!  And how pines like bilberry bushes at their feet and sometimes little oaks—­all trees making a clear, deliberate choice, and holding firmly to it?  Some trees obviously—­it’s very strange and marked—­seem to prefer the human.”

The old lady sat up crackling, for this was more than she could permit.  Her stiff silk dress emitted little sharp reports.

“We know,” she answered, “that He was said to have walked in the garden in the cool of the evening”—­the gulp betrayed the effort that it cost her—­“but we are nowhere told that He hid in the trees, or anything like that.  Trees, after all, we must remember, are only large vegetables.”

“True,” was the soft answer, “but in everything that grows, has life, that is, there’s mystery past all finding out.  The wonder that lies hidden in our own souls lies also hidden, I venture to assert, in the stupidity and silence of a mere potato.”

The observation was not meant to be amusing.  It was not amusing.  No one laughed.  On the contrary, the words conveyed in too literal a sense the feeling that haunted all that conversation.  Each one in his own way realized—­with beauty, with wonder, with alarm—­that the talk had somehow brought the whole vegetable kingdom nearer to that of man.  Some link had been established between the two.  It was not wise, with that great Forest listening at their very doors, to speak so plainly.  The forest edged up closer while they did so.

And Mrs. Bittacy, anxious to interrupt the horrid spell, broke suddenly in upon it with a matter-of-fact suggestion.  She did not like her husband’s prolonged silence, stillness.  He seemed so negative—­so changed.

“David,” she said, raising her voice, “I think you’re feeling the dampness.  It’s grown chilly.  The fever comes so suddenly, you know, and it might be wide to take the tincture.  I’ll go and get it, dear, at once.  It’s better.”  And before he could object she had left the room to bring the homeopathic dose that she believed in, and that, to please her, he swallowed by the tumbler-full from week to week.

And the moment the door closed behind her, Sanderson began again, though now in quite a different tone.  Mr. Bittacy sat up in his chair.  The two men obviously resumed the conversation—­the real conversation interrupted beneath the cedar—­and left aside the sham one which was so much dust merely thrown in the old lady’s eyes.

“Trees love you, that’s the fact,” he said earnestly.  “Your service to them all these years abroad has made them know you.”