In the Border Country | Page 7

which of you will go furthest?"
"Ask me no more, mother," she said faintly, "but tell me this: why is life so cruel? For you know everything and this wood is not what I thought."
"Child," said the Bee-woman, "for I suppose you call it cruel because it does not please you, why life is as it is, I do not know; but that it is so no one can doubt who has tried to make it otherwise and failed. Now, what will you do?"
She bent her head before the eyes of the Bee-woman, ashamed, because in her deep brown eyes she saw reflected her lost years.
"What shall I do?" she asked meekly.
"Go back, child," said the Bee-woman, and her voice warmed like summer sunshine on the wall at noon, "go back and let men make pictures: do you make men!"
Then outside the door she saw the little path and suddenly she seemed to know where it would lead and how, and she had no fear at all of the wood.
"Good-bye, mother, God keep you!" she said and stepped over the threshold.
"So long as I keep my bees, child, God will doubtless keep me," said the Bee-woman, "and that is true in this wood and out of it. Now hurry back, for you have stayed almost too long."
She waved her hand and turned from the hut, threading her way among the trees.
"I must go back, I must go back!" she said to herself, and moved more and more quickly, for something drew her almost off the ground.
Once she thought she heard a low cry behind her, and as she looked back she saw some one running hotly through the wood across her track.
She called aloud to help the poor creature, for she saw that it was a woman in deadly terror, wrapped in a long gown, with two great braids of dark hair, that hit against her back like whips, who turned her pale, crazed face--and it was the woman in whose carriage she had driven to the edge of the wood.
"Come back!" she called, "this is the way! Come back!"
But the runner clasped her shaking hands upon her heart and leaned hotly forward in one last burst of speed, and fell fainting across the threshold of the Bee-woman's hut.
Then a panic terror caught the woman who had left that hut, a terror to which her first fright was as nothing.
"In God's name," she screamed, "where am I? What am I? Who is that wrinkled woman with young eyes? What wood is this?"
So screaming she whirled about and missed her footing, and fell heavily over the root of a great tree, striking her head in the fall.
A sickening pain washed in great waves through every nerve, and she struggled, turning her head feebly from side to side, closing her eyes against the blinding light that pierced her brain like knives.
The tall trees swam and wavered before her, the boughs tossed and swayed and receded till they were like a forest seen in a picture. Then she saw that they were framed in a window, with empty space behind them, and that she was staring at them from a bed in a strange room.
Over her eyes bent two brown eyes, young and kind.
"Do you see me? Can you speak to me?" she heard.
"I do not hear the bees," she muttered, "I miss them. And yet you are the Bee-woman, are you not? I know your eyes----"
"I am the nurse," said the voice, "there are no bees here. You hear the rumbling in the street below. I am glad to see you open your eyes--we were growing worried. You remember you are at the hospital, do you not? Would you like to see your husband? He is just outside the door."
She looked long at the nurse. "My husband," she murmured. "Oh, yes. Does he know that I got away? How did you bring me back here? Tell the doctor that--that I could not bear it and that he must take me through without it. He--he will be glad--"
"The operation is over," said the nurse, "and you have nothing to bear, now. You are just coming out of the ether. Do you understand? Everything is all right. You have only to lie quiet, now, and you may see your husband, if you wish. He wanted to see you as soon as you were safely out of the wood, he said."
The tears gathered in her eyes, but she was too weak to wipe them.
"'Out of the wood,'" she whispered, "'out of the wood'! So that is what they mean! But he will never go into that wood ... yes, call him in."

The Next Lesson
THE FARM BY THE FOREST
It was years afterward, and in October, the very climax of a late and lingering autumn, that I sat