The challenge was unheeded.If she had thrown herself violently against the nearest tree-trunk,she could not have been stricken more breathless than she was by the compact,embattled solitude that encompassed her.The hopelessness of impressing these cold and passive vaults with her selfish passion filled her with a vague fear.In her rage of the previous night she had not seen the wood in its profound immobility.Left alone with the majesty of those enormous columns,she trembled and turned faint.The silence of the hollow tree she had just quitted seemed to her less awful than the crushing presence of these mute and monstrous witnesses of her weakness.Like a wounded quail with lowered crest and trailing wing,she crept back to her hiding place.
Even then the influence of the wood was still upon her.She picked up the novel she had contemptuously thrown aside,only to let it fall again in utter weariness.For a moment her feminine curiosity was excited by the discovery of an old book,in whose blank leaves were pressed a variety of flowers and woodland grasses.As she could not conceive that these had been kept for any but a sentimental purpose,she was disappointed to find that underneath each was a sentence in an unknown tongue,that even to her untutored eye did not appear to be the language of passion.
Finally she rearranged the couch of skins and blankets,and,imparting to it in three clever shakes an entirely different character,lay down to pursue her reveries.But nature asserted herself,and ere she knew it she was asleep.
So intense and prolonged had been her previous excitement that,the tension once relieved,she passed into a slumber of exhaustion so deep that she seemed scarce to breathe.High noon succeeded morning,the central shaft received a single ray of upper sunlight,the afternoon came and went,the shadows gathered below,the sunset fires began to eat their way through the groined roof,and she still slept.She slept even when the bark hangings of the chamber were put aside,and the young man reentered.
He laid down a bundle he was carrying and softly approached the sleeper.For a moment he was startled from his indifference;she lay so still and motionless.But this was not all that struck him;the face before him was no longer the passionate,haggard visage that confronted him that morning;the feverish air,the burning color,the strained muscles of mouth and brow,and the staring eyes were gone;wiped away,perhaps,by the tears that still left their traces on cheek and dark eyelash.It was the face of a handsome woman of thirty,with even a suggestion of softness in the contour of the cheek and arching of her upper lip,no longer rigidly drawn down in anger,but relaxed by sleep on her white teeth.
With the lithe,soft tread that was habitual to him,the young man moved about,examining the condition of the little chamber and its stock of provisions and necessaries,and withdrew presently,to reappear as noiselessly with a tin bucket of water.
This done,he replenished the little pile of fuel with an armful of bark and pine cones,cast an approving glance about him,which included the sleeper,and silently departed.
It was night when she awoke.She was surrounded by a profound darkness,except where the shaft-like opening made a nebulous mist in the corner of her wooden cavern.Providentially she struggled back to consciousness slowly,so that the solitude and silence came upon her gradually,with a growing realization of the events of the past twenty-four hours,but without a shock.
She was alone here,but safe still,and every hour added to her chances of ultimate escape.She remembered to have seen a candle among the articles on the shelf,and she began to grope her way towards the matches.Suddenly she stopped.What was that panting?