Automobiles came and went upon the public road, and to escape them
I crossed a wooden foot-bridge spanning a weedy ditch, struck into a
path bordering a wide field followed it aimlessly for a while, and
before I knew it was in the Enchanted Wood.
The Enchanted Wood was carpeted with brown and sweet-smelling
pine-needles, with green clumps of honeysuckle breaking out here and
there in moist spots. There were cassena bushes, full of vivid
scarlet berries; and crooked, gray-green cedars; and brown boles of
pine-trees; and the shallowest, gayest, absurdest little thread of a
brook giggling as it went about its important business of keeping a
lip of woodland green.
It was very, very still there, somewhat as Gethsemane might have
been, I fancy. I had wanted to be alone, that I might wrestle with
my trouble. Yet now that I was facing it, my spirit quailed. Never
had I felt so desolate, or dreamed that the human heart could bear
such anguish.
If I had had the faintest warning, that I might have saved myself!
If I had never come to Hynds House at all, but had lived my busy,
matter-of-fact, quiet life! Yet the idea of never having seen him,
never having loved him, was more cruel than the cruellest suffering
that loving entailed.
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