‘I’m all right. Go ahead!’ he replied under his breath. ‘I can see better now!’ ‘Now look,’ she said, stopping in front of him and turning round. The darkness lifted somewhat as he bent down to follow the direction of her gaze. On every side, dim and thronging, he saw the stems of immense trees rising upwards into obscurity. There were hundreds upon hundreds of them. His eyes followed their outline till the endless number bewildered him. Overhead, the stars were shining faintly through the tangled network of their branches. Odours of earth and moss and leaves, cool and delicate, rose about them; vast depths of silence stretched away in every direction. Great ferns stood motionless, with all the magic of frosted window-panes, among their roots. All was still and dark and silent. It was the heart of a great forest before the dawn—prehistoric, unknown to man. ‘Oh, I wonder—I wonder——’ began Paul, groping about him clumsily with his hands to feel the way. ‘Oh, please don’t talk so loud,’ Nixie whispered, pinching his arm; ‘we shall wake up if you do. Only people in dreams come to places like this.’ ‘You know the place?’ he exclaimed with increasing excitement. ‘So do I almost. I’m sure this has all happened before, only I can’t remember——’ ‘We must keep as still as mice.’ ‘We are—still as mice.’ ‘This is where the winds sleep when they’re not blowing. It’s their resting-place.’ He looked about him, drawing a deep breath. ‘Look out; you’ll wake them if you breathe like _that_,’ whispered the child. ‘Are they asleep now?’ ‘Of course. Can’t you see?’ ‘Not much—yet!’ ‘Move like a cat, and speak in whispers. We may see them when they wake.’ ‘How soon?’ ‘Dawn. The wind always wakes with the sun. It’s getting closer now.’ It was very wonderful. No words can describe adequately the still splendour of that vast forest as they stood there, waiting for the sunrise. Nothing stirred. The trees were carved out of some marvellous dream-stuff, motionless, yet conveying the impression of life. Paul knew it and recognised it. All primeval woods possess that quality—trees that know nothing of men and have never heard the ringing of the axe. The silence was of death, yet a sense of life that is far beyond death pulsed through it. Cisterns of quiet, gigantic, primitive life lay somewhere hidden in these shadowed glades. It seemed the counterpart of a man’s soul before rude passion and power have stirred it into activity. Here all slept potentially, as in a human soul. The huge, sombre pines rose from their beds of golden moss to shake their crests faintly to the stars, awaiting the coming of the true passion—the great Sun of life, that should call them to splendour, to reality, and to the struggle of a bigger life than they yet knew, when they might even try to shake free from their roots in the hard, confining earth, and fly to the source of their existence—the sun.