I strode on grimly in a sort of nameless anger, past the outlying houses, past empty lots with rank grass still awaiting the pressure of habitation, until the futilely laid-out streets, empty of all life, gave way to open country and meadowland. I was making my way to the wood that lies between the meadows, a skirting dairy farm or two, some scraggy orchard here and there, and the great line of the aqueduct, the most Roman of our enterprises, that carries the water to New York. In the wood I somehow felt I should be taken again to the bosom of earth and the sickness of my soul be healed. I looked up at the sky and it was radiant with dazzling white clouds that made my mole’s eyes water. A merry breeze fanned the newborn earth and once on the edge of the wood I caught that indescribable whisper of trees which to me is the earth-note, the age-long speech and intimation of the planet that, at all hazards, life must go on; that it is decreed, irresistible and sweet. A pang of envy stabbed my breast at the thought of the lovers abroad to-day, even though those lovers were almost my children. I for one find it difficult to keep apart those conflicting emotions of the heart. But do parents of the flesh, I wonder, encounter no similar struggles? Once among the trees I was permeated by that type of gentle melancholy serenity that woods induce. Softly I strolled about on last year’s pine needles and leaves, sodden now after a winter’s snowfall and a year’s rains. The cat-like tread of your primeval aborigine returns even to your civilized boots in the Woods of Westermain, the stalker and the hunter throbs faintly in your blood. My path led me up a slope where the trees, youngish still, like myself, were no saplings, however, but towered in a slender abandon toward the patches of cerulean sky overhead. They seemed to escort me, those tapering maples and sycamores with their feathery foliage, like a troop of young monks still fresh from their novitiate, still full of the sap of life. Somehow trees in a forest have always reminded me of monks chanting litanies and benedictions. The bass-note of all their murmurings is invariably so solemn. From the crest the land drops in a declivity and thence, soon abandoning the woodland in a fringe of bushes and underbrush, rolls on to the massive moundlike line of the aqueduct. On a sudden I heard voices beneath me a little way down the declivity. And peering down with the delicious thrill of alertness that returns from primitive ages even to-day among trees, I perceived Alicia and Randolph with their backs to me in earnest colloquy. My first impulse, naturally, was to hail them or to make some sort of monitory sound that might apprise them of my presence. But a sudden movement of Alicia’s arrested all force or motion on my part. Her hands shot forward and with a vehemence that was obviously not loverlike, she cried out in a tormented voice: