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. [Pg 33]"Good-bye, mother, God keep you!" she said and stepped over the threshold. [Pg 33] "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[Pg 34] woman in whose carriage she had driven to the edge of the wood. [Pg 34] "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?"
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