Audrey

She pressed her cheek against the dead leaves, and, with the smell of the

earth in her nostrils, looked sideways with half-closed eyes and made a

radiant mist of the forest round about. A drowsy warmth was in the air;

the birds sang far away; through a rift in the foliage a sunbeam came and

rested beside her like A gilded snake.

For a time, wrapped in the warmth and the green and gold mist, she lay as

quiet as the sunbeam; of the earth earthy, in pact with the mould beneath

the leaves, with the slowly crescent trunks, brown or silver-gray, with

moss and lichened rock, and with all life that basked or crept or flew. At

last, however, the mind aroused, and she opened her eyes, saw, and thought

of what she saw. It was pleasant in the forest. She watched the flash of a

bird, as blue as the sky, from limb to limb; she listened to the elfin

waterfall; she drew herself with hand and arm across the leaves to the

edge of the pale brown ring, plucked a honeysuckle bough and brought it

back to the silver column of the beech; and lastly, glancing up from the

rosy sprig within her hand, she saw a man coming toward her, down the path

that she had thought hidden, holding his arm before him for shield against

brier and branch, and looking curiously about him as for a thing which he

had come out to seek.