There is a sadness in the wood itself that harmonizes with her thoughts. The bare trees, the fast-decaying leaves beneath her feet, all speak of death and change. Swinburne's exquisite lines rise involuntarily to her mind:
"Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded,
Even like as a leaf the year is withered.
All the fruit of the day from all her branches
Gathered, neither is any left to gather.
All the flowers are dead, the tender blossoms,
All are taken away; the season wasted
Like an ember among the fallen ashes."
Seating herself upon a little grassy mound, with her head thrown back against the trunk of a gnarled but kindly beech, she waits her lover's coming. She is very early, almost by her own calculation half an hour must elapse before he can join her. Satisfied that she cannot see him until then, she is rapidly falling into a gentle doze, when footsteps behind her cause her to start into a sitting posture.
"So soon," she says, and, rising, finds herself face to face with—Philip Shadwell.