and there is no Motiveless Malice spoiling things.  She looked up.  The gray green moss hung festooned from branch to branch; and the light sifted down a tempered rain of gold; and all the shiny evergreens shook gypsy castanets of joy to the riffling wind.  She listened.  The voices behind had faded away; and the air was vibrant of voiceless voices, of pixy tambourines beating the silence.  There was a hush, the sibilant hush of waters rushing down from the far snows of the Holy Cross; and a flutter—­the flutter of all the little leaves clapping their hands; and a big voiceless voice of solemn undertone—­the diapason of the pines harping the age-old melodies to the touch of the wind’s invisible hands, melodies of the soul of the sea in the heart of the tree, of strength and power and eternity.  As she listened, she could fancy some vast oratorio voicing the themes of humanity and the universe and God.

Then all the little people of the woods came peeping through the greenery surveying her, weighing her, examining her, testing her spirit of good or ill.  A little squirrel went scampering up one huge tree trunk and down another, just a pace ahead, scouting for the other pixies of the woods, till with a scurr-r-r and chitter—­chipper—­ee, he whisked back in his tracks.  “She’s all right, people,” he said.  Then a whisky jack flitted from branch to branch of the under brush—­always just a step ahead, not saying as much as was his custom, but peeking a deal with head cocked from side to side.  “No,” said Eleanor, “I have no camp crumbs:  you go back.”  The little red crested cross bill twittered in front of her from spray to spray of the purple fire weed and fern fronds; then, concluded that she was only a part of this out door world, anyway, and went back about his business on the trail behind.  Two or three times, there was a vague rustle in the leaves that she couldn’t localize—­water ouzel in moss covert, or hawk babies in hiding, or—­or what?  She couldn’t descry.  Then, suddenly, with a hiss—­ss and swear plain as a bird could swear, a little male grouse came sprinting down the trail to stop her, ruff up, tail spread to a fan, wings down, screaming at her in bad words “to stop! to stop! or he’d pick her eyes out!” Eleanor naturally stopped.  There was a rustle and a flump; and a mother grouse whirred up with her brood—­a dozen of them Eleanor counted, was it a second family? babies just in feather, clumsy and heavy of wing; and the little man ducked to hiding among the dead leaves.  Eleanor peered everywhere.  There was not the glint of an eye to betray hiding.  She laughed and looked back for Matthews and his little pupil.  A turn of the lane shut off all view; and again, she had that curious sensation of a vague movement back among the evergreens.  She glanced forward.  The light was shut off by a huge pile of windfall giant tree on tree, moss grown, with cypress and alder shoots from the great, broad dead trunks, a pile the height of a house.  Passage