‘I notice,’ she said, favouring him with as much reflection as a splendid lover could crave for, ’that you never look down, you never look on the ground, but always either up or straight before you.’

‘People have remarked it,’ said he, smiling.  ’Here we are at this funereal tree again.  All roads lead to Rome, and ours appears to conduct us perpetually to this tree.  It ‘s the only dead one here.’

He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branches decorously clothed in decay:  a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass.  It was very witch-like, of a witch in her incantation-smoke.

‘Not a single bare spot! but dead, dead as any peeled and fallen!’ said Alvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen.  ’This is a tree for a melancholy poet—­eh, Clotilde?—­for him to come on it by moonlight, after a scene with his mistress, or tales of her!  By the way and by the way, my fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind of garb for me, should I be ordered off the first to join the dusky army below.  Women who put on their dead husbands in public are not well-mannered women, though they may be excellent professional widows, excellent!’

He snapped the lichen-dust from his fingers, observing that he was not sure the contrast of the flourishing and blighted was not more impressive in sunlight:  and then he looked from the tree to his true love’s hair.  The tree at a little distance seemed run over with sunless lizards:  her locks were golden serpents.

‘Shall I soon see your baroness?’ Clotilde asked him.

‘Not in advance of the ceremony,’ he answered.  ’In good time.  You understand—­an old friend making room for a new one, and that one young and beautiful, with golden tresses; at first . . . !  But her heart is quite sound.  Have no fear!  I guarantee it; I know her to the roots.  She desires my welfare, she does my behests.  If I am bound to her by gratitude, so, and in a greater degree, is she to me.  The utmost she will demand is that my bride shall be worthy of me—­a good mate for me in the fight to come; and I have tested my bride and found her half my heart; therefore she passes the examination with the baroness.’

They left the tree behind them.

‘We will take good care not to return this way again,’ said Alvan, without looking back.  ’That tree belongs to a plantation of the under world; its fellows grow in the wood across Acheron, and that tree has looked into the ghastliness of the flood and seen itself.  Hecate and Hermes know about it.  Phoebus cannot light it.  That tree stands for Death blooming.  We think it sinister, but down there it is a homely tree.  Down there!  When do we go?  The shudder in that tree is the air exchanging between Life and Death—­the ghosts going and coming:  it’s on the border line.  I just felt the creep.  I think you did.  The reason is—­there is always a material reason—­that you were warm, and a bit of chill breeze took you as you gazed; while for my part I was imagining at that very moment what of all possible causes might separate us, and I acknowledged that death could do the trick.  But death, my love, is far from us two!’