"They wouldn't let me," said Jenny, apparently not disappointed at being thus kept at home. He sought to make the best of his disappointment. "Even if you could go, I am afraid you never would be quiet, Jenny." "I'm afraid I wouldn't," Jenny replied, responsive to every suggestion. He lingered, tenderly disturbed by her: the roots of the future were growing in him this morning. He was changing, he was changing _her_: there was an outreaching of his nature to draw her into the future alongside him. Jenny suddenly stopped dancing and came closer to the fence, having all at once become more conscious of Webster, standing there as he had never stood before, looking at her as he had never looked. Her nature was of yielding sweetness, clasping trust. She glanced around the cottage windows: the situation was very exposed. Webster glanced at the cottage windows: the situation did not appear in the least exposed. Her eyes became more round with an idea: "Are you coming back this way?" "I _will_ come back this way." Jenny danced away from the fence, laughing excitedly: "Will it be late?" "I can _make_ it late?" * * * * * Webster climbed the fence of the forest under the foliage of a big tree of some unknown kind and descended waist-deep into the foliage of a weed with a leaf as big as an elephant's ear: it had a beautiful trumpet-shaped white and purple flower. He wished he knew what it was: on the very edge of the forest, at his very first step, he had sunk waist-deep into ignorance. Then he waded through the rank nightshade and stepped out upon the grass of the woods--the green carpet of thick turf, Kentucky bluegrass. At last he was there under those softly waving trees which summer after summer he had watched from the porch and windows: long they had called to him and now he had answered their call. But the disappointment! As he had looked at the forest across the distance, the tree-tops had made an unbroken billowy line of green along the blue horizon, continuous like the waves of the sea as he imagined the sea. Somewhere under that forest roof he had taken it for granted that there would be thick undergrowth, wild spots for shy singing nesting birds. The disappointment! The trees stood ten or twenty or thirty feet apart. The longest boughs barely touched each other, their lowest sometimes hung forty or fifty feet in the air. He did not see a tree whose branches he could reach with his upstretched arm. The sun shone everywhere under them every bright day and the grass grew thick up to their trunks.