Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/140

132 She took Pauguk back to her kennel and Taylor started away through the forest. Until dark he walked and came out at the mill, ate with Raymer, the mill foreman, smoked and started back through the night and the forest.

The gash of the fire line let down the light from an avenue of stars to give the road beneath his feet a grayness in the flat black which was all about. No individual trees were discernible; here and there against the sky could be seen the motionless reach of tufted limb but on either side the pine was an unbroken wall, silent, motionless—And yet as he went through it that forest seemed to have the powers of speech and motion, for Helen Foraker had breathed life into it that day for him. It was no more fleshless, no more without consciousness for him than would have been a company of silent, unmoving men ranked under the stars. It was dynamic, powerful, capable of great manifestations, waiting—waiting—waiting for the word to stir—

It was an eerie feeling which enveloped him there, alone in the gloom and the silence. He felt like an intruder, like an unwelcome stranger—and small, mean, low-spirited. He, the seeker after possessions, after honest possessions, won by his own skill and effort, felt mean, because that day he had realized that he had not even sensed the example that had been all about him for weeks, had dragged it down to the level of his feeble appreciation, thought and spoken of it in his own inadequate terms.

Foraker's Folly tonight represented something that had never entered his ken: an idea beyond material gain, no matter how heroically won. Not once in her talk had Helen spoken of what it meant to her in wealth, in profit.