enticed, but she passed it by.  Straight as an arrow she pierced to the heart of the wood that lay to the north.  Thorn and bramble, branch of bloom and entangling vine, stayed her not; long since she had found or had made for herself a path to the centre of the labyrinth.  Here was a beech-tree, older by many a year than the young wood,—­a solitary tree spared by the axe what time its mates had fallen.  Tall and silver-gray the column of the trunk rose to meet wide branches and the green lace-work of tender leaves.  The earth beneath was clean swept, and carpeted with the leaves of last year; a wide, dry, pale brown enchanted ring, against whose borders pressed the riot of the forest.  Vine and bush, flower and fern, could not enter; but Audrey came and laid herself down upon a cool and shady bed.

By human measurement the house that she had left was hard by; even from under the beech-tree Mistress Deborah’s thin call could draw her back to the walls which sheltered her, which she had been taught to call her home.  But it was not her soul’s home, and now the veil of the kindly woods withdrew it league on league, shut it out, made it as if it had never been.  From the charmed ring beneath the beech-tree she took possession of her world; for her the wind murmured, the birds sang, insects hummed or shrilled, the green saplings nodded their heads.  Flowers, and the bedded moss, and the little stream that leaped from a precipice of three feet into the calm of a hand-deep pool spoke to her.  She was happy.  Gone was the house and its inmates; gone Paris the schoolmaster, who had taught her to write, and whose hand touching hers in guidance made her sick and cold; gone Hugon the trader, whom she feared and hated.  Here were no toil, no annoy, no frightened flutterings of the heart; she had passed the frontier, and was safe in her own land.

She pressed her cheek against the dead leaves, and, with the smell of the earth in her nostrils, looked sideways with half-closed eyes and made a radiant mist of the forest round about.  A drowsy warmth was in the air; the birds sang far away; through a rift in the foliage a sunbeam came and rested beside her like A gilded snake.

For a time, wrapped in the warmth and the green and gold mist, she lay as quiet as the sunbeam; of the earth earthy, in pact with the mould beneath the leaves, with the slowly crescent trunks, brown or silver-gray, with moss and lichened rock, and with all life that basked or crept or flew.  At last, however, the mind aroused, and she opened her eyes, saw, and thought of what she saw.  It was pleasant in the forest.  She watched the flash of a bird, as blue as the sky, from limb to limb; she listened to the elfin waterfall; she drew herself with hand and arm across the leaves to the edge of the pale brown ring, plucked a honeysuckle bough and brought it back to the silver column of the beech; and lastly, glancing up from the rosy sprig within her hand, she saw a man coming toward her, down the path that she had thought hidden, holding his arm before him for shield against brier and branch, and looking curiously about him as for a thing which he had come out to seek.