“That’s what I mean,” she replied, the texts he dreaded rising in an unuttered crowd behind the words.  “He’s one of those things that we are warned would come—­one of those Latter-Day things.”  For her mind still bristled with the bogeys of the Antichrist and Prophecy, and she had only escaped the Number of the Beast, as it were, by the skin of her teeth.  The Pope drew most of her fire usually, because she could understand him; the target was plain and she could shoot.  But this tree-and-forest business was so vague and horrible.  It terrified her.  “He makes me think,” she went on, “of Principalities and Powers in high places, and of things that walk in the darkness.  I did not like the way he spoke of trees getting alive in the night, and all that; it made me think of wolves in sheep’s clothing.  And when I saw that awful thing in the sky above the lawn—­”

But he interrupted her at once, for that was something he had decided it was best to leave unmentioned.  Certainly it was better not discussed.

“He only meant, I think, Sophie,” he put in gravely, yet with a little smile, “that trees may have a measure of conscious life—­rather a nice idea on the whole, surely,—­something like that bit we read in the Times the other night, you remember—­and that a big forest may possess a sort of Collective Personality.  Remember, he’s an artist, and poetical.”

“It’s dangerous,” she said emphatically.  “I feel it’s playing with fire, unwise, unsafe—­”

“Yet all to the glory of God,” he urged gently.  “We must not shut our ears and eyes to knowledge—­of any kind, must we?”

“With you, David, the wish is always farther than the thought,” she rejoined.  For, like the child who thought that “suffered under Pontius Pilate” was “suffered under a bunch of violets,” she heard her proverbs phonetically and reproduced them thus.  She hoped to convey her warning in the quotation.  “And we must always try the spirits whether they be of God,” she added tentatively.

“Certainly, dear, we can always do that,” he assented, getting into bed.

But, after a little pause, during which she blew the light out, David Bittacy settling down to sleep with an excitement in his blood that was new and bewilderingly delightful, realized that perhaps he had not said quite enough to comfort her.  She was lying awake by his side, still frightened.  He put his head up in the darkness.

“Sophie,” he said softly, “you must remember, too, that in any case between us and—­and all that sort of thing—­there is a great gulf fixed, a gulf that cannot be crossed—­er—­while we are still in the body.”

And hearing no reply, he satisfied himself that she was already asleep and happy.  But Mrs. Bittacy was not asleep.  She heard the sentence, only she said nothing because she felt her thought was better unexpressed.  She was afraid to hear the words in the darkness.  The Forest outside was listening and might hear them too—­the Forest that was “roaring further out.”