'Isn't it nice?' he said. 'Aren't they fine bits?' She took them without answering, and put one piece carefully in her
dress. It was quite against her rule to wear a flower. He took his place
by her side.
'I always like the gold-green of cut fields,' he said. 'They seem to
give off sunshine even when the sky's greyer than a tabby cat.' She laughed, instinctively putting out her hand towards the glowing
field on her right.
They entered the larch-wood. There the chill wind was changed into
sound. Like a restless insect he hovered about her, like a butterfly
whose antennae flicker and twitch sensitively as they gather
intelligence, touching the aura, as it were, of the female. He was
exceedingly delicate in his handling of her.
The path was cut windingly through the lofty, dark, and closely serried
trees, which vibrated like chords under the soft bow of the wind. Now
and again he would look down passages between the trees--narrow pillared
corridors, dusky as if webbed across with mist. All round was a
twilight, thickly populous with slender, silent trunks. Helena stood
still, gazing up at the tree-tops where the bow of the wind was drawn,
causing slight, perceptible quivering. Byrne walked on without her. At a
bend in the path he stood, with his hand on the roundness of a
larch-trunk, looking back at her, a blue fleck in the brownness of
congregated trees. She moved very slowly down the path.
'I might as well not exist, for all she is aware of me,' he said to
himself bitterly. Nevertheless, when she drew near he said brightly: 'Have you noticed how the thousands of dry twigs between the trunks make
a brown mist, a brume?' She looked at him suddenly as if interrupted.
'H'm? Yes, I see what you mean.' She smiled at him, because of his bright boyish tone and manner.
'That's the larch fog,' he laughed.
'Yes,' she said, 'you see it in pictures. I had not noticed it before.' He shook the tree on which his hand was laid.
'It laughs through its teeth,' he said, smiling, playing with everything
he touched.
As they went along she caught swiftly at her hat; then she stooped,
picking up a hat-pin of twined silver. She laughed to herself as if
pleased by a coincidence.
'Last year,' she said, 'the larch-fingers stole both my pins--the same
ones.' He looked at her, wondering how much he was filling the place of a ghost
with warmth. He thought of Siegmund, and seemed to see him swinging down
the steep bank out of the wood exactly as he himself was doing at the
moment, with Helena stepping carefully behind. He always felt a deep
sympathy and kinship with Siegmund; sometimes he thought he
hated Helena.