“I want to go out.” It was too late—too late. But what pretty flowers grew along the path! White ones with yellow eyes, and jessamine, and even pink wild roses, and honeysuckle too. Yet when you picked them they fell like dust. “This is very strange,” thought Deborah. “I thought they were real.” But no one answered, unless silence answered—no one at all. And, looking on the ground, she saw that it was all covered with soft black dust, before and after. “It is easy to walk upon,” said she. “And the flowers look pretty as they grow, but the silence and the gloom frighten me just a little.” And then suddenly black rocks rose in the path with little jagged edges. They cut into your shoes and hurt you ever so much, and instead of getting better the road became worse. Presently from between two black rocks shot out a crimson fountain across the path. Deborah stood still. “It looks like blood,” she said, and shuddered. “And it kills all the flowers as it passes on. I don’t like this wood, I think I’ll go back.” But when you looked behind briars had grown across the path, and the silence was so terrible that it seemed to say “Go on.” And there was only one way to tread, and that was through the path of blood. So Deborah went on, and the red stream soaked through the thin shoes, and sent a strange kind of pain to her heart. “It’s just like having toothache very badly, only I never knew of a dentist who could pull out hearts.” But the pain became so bad that for the time she was silent too, like everything else round about. And then the stream flowed into a deep chasm that seemed to lead underground, only now and again you could hear the gurgling as it went, so that it never seemed to pass away, not quite. After a time the road looked better again, for the rocks had vanished, but now and then in the gloom you put your foot down on a very sharp one, and when you drew it up quickly it gave you cramp, so that you almost feared to put it down. This path made you very tired. You kept slipping because you could not see properly, and the worst of it was there was no path out, nor any back. You were forced forward by Silence, that cruel and most perfect teacher that sneers at heartaches and pain, and looks with a withering smile on self-pity. You see it was a magical forest; to stand still was to fall, to fall was to be stifled by something. It is best to go on, therefore, as long as you can. And then, after a weary length of road had been travelled, the gloom turned to darkness, so gradually that at first you thought it was your eyes that were dim; and ever from the unseen channel came the gurgle of the stream, the only sound in the still forest. Presently the darkness had turned to blackness, so that you groped the way along; and now the weird Silence and the gentle sound of the unseen stream led you between them in blind faith, till with a sudden bubble the stream shot up again and you slipped in the quagmire of leaves.