He touched my hand, bowed to Susan, and went tramping away into the timber. The thick leafage blotted his lantern-light from our view before his back had been turned twenty seconds.
Susan and I gazed at each other, and smiled rather uneasily.
"It's warm," she breathed, and took off her cloak. Dropping it upon one of the humped roots of the great central tree, she sat down on it with her back to the trunk. "What kind of a tree is this?"
I gazed up at the gnarled stem, or as much of it as I could see in the firelight. Finally I shook my head.
"I don't know—I'm no expert," I admitted. "At least it's very big, and undoubtedly very old—the sort of tree that used to mark a place of sacrifice."
At the word "sacrifice," Susan lifted her shoulders as if in distaste. "You're right, Talbot. It would be something grim and Druid-like." She began to recite, half to herself:
That tree in whose dark shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer
And shall himself be slain.