“Whence do you come?” she went on, in a soft panting voice. “But what does it matter, since you are here! I knew in the end you would return. This—this” (she put her hand upon her bosom)—“Oh, it is a fierce magnet that would have drawn you across the world!”
He pulled at the door—let in a lance of brilliant light that struck full upon his face. Something in its expression appeared to startle her. She leaned forward and uttered a sudden miserable cry.
“Where have you been—what have you done! My God, let me look!”
The next instant she backed from him a little, throwing her hands to her eyes as if she were blinded.
“It is there,” she cried, “what I have longed and prayed for; but it is not for me!”
He recovered his voice in a fury.
“Prayed!” he cried. “Are such prayers, from such a source, answered? Stand off, for shame! This meeting is all an accident. I have neither sought, nor desired, to see you. It is an accident—do you hear?”
He tore open the door, jumped the step, ran a few paces, and stopped, with an exclamation of sheer astonishment. A huge ruin of trunk and branch closed his vista. The old woodland monarch, the type of stately quincentennial growth and decline, was shattered where it stood. At the last, facing its thousandth tempest, it had been wounded to death in the forefront of the battle. The brand had struck its mightiest branch, tearing it from its socket; and the crashing limb in its downfall had wrenched apart the trunk, revealing a great hollow heart of decay.
The quiet drip and fall from loaded leaves; the faint rumble of the retreating storm; the steam from the hot-soaked grass—Ned was conscious of them all as he stood a moment in awe. Then he hurried forward again—up to the very scene of the disaster.
The ruin was complete; the silver hearts were fused or vanished; the sacred fence was whirled abroad, in twisted, fantastic shapes. So much for the immunity of beech-trees. He could hardly dare to face the moral of his escape.