An unmistakable suggestion of some haunting primeval solitude,
a sense of the hushed and mysterious proximity of a nature she had never
known before, the strange half-intoxicating breath of unsunned foliage
and untrodden grasses and herbs, all combined to exalt her as she
cantered forward. Even her horse seemed to have acquired an intelligent
liberty, or rather to have established a sympathy with her in his needs
and her own longings; instinctively she no longer pulled him with the
curb; the reins hung loosely on his self-arched and unfettered neck;
secure in this loneliness she found herself even talking to him with
barbaric freedom. As she went on, the vague hush of all things animate
and inanimate around her seemed to thicken, until she unconsciously
halted before a dim and pillared wood, and a vast and heathless opening
on whose mute brown lips Nature seemed to have laid the finger of
silence. She forgot the party she had left, she forgot the luncheon she
was going to; more important still she forgot that she had already left
the traveled track far behind her, and, tremulous with anticipation,
rode timidly into that arch of shadow.
As her horse's hoofs fell noiselessly on the elastic moss-carpeted aisle
she forgot even more than that. She forgot the artificial stimulus and
excitement of the life she had been leading so long; she forgot the
small meannesses and smaller worries of her well-to-do experiences; she
forgot herself,--rather she regained a self she had long forgotten.
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