They entered the larch-wood. There the chill wind was changed into sound. Like a restless insect he hovered about her, like a butterfly whose antennæ flicker and twitch sensitively as they gather intelligence, touching the aura, as it were, of the female. He was exceedingly delicate in his handling of her.
The path was cut windingly through the lofty, dark, and closely serried trees, which vibrated like chords under the soft bow of the wind. Now and again he would look down passages between the trees—narrow pillared corridors, dusky as if webbed across with mist. All around was a twilight, thickly populous with slender, silent trunks. Helena stood still, gazing up at the tree-tops where the bow of the wind was drawn, causing slight, perceptible quivering. Byrne walked on without her. At a bend in the path he stood, with his hand on the roundness of a larch-trunk, looking back at her, a blue fleck in the brownness of congregated trees. She moved very slowly down the path.
“I might as well not exist, for all she is aware of me,” he said to himself bitterly. Nevertheless, when she drew near he said brightly:
“Have you noticed how the thousands of dry twigs between the trunks make a brown mist, a brume?”
She looked at him suddenly as if interrupted.
“H’m? Yes, I see what you mean.”
She smiled at him, because of his bright boyish tone and manner.
“That’s the larch fog,” he laughed.
“Yes,” she said, “you see it in pictures. I had not noticed it before.”
He shook the tree on which his hand was laid.
