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For a moment I thought he might be going to revert to the matter of my marrying him, but he lay tossing lightly at the dropped needles, and the even breathing silence of the wood closed in again. We sat so long that we were startled on discovering that if Herman got back to the Inn in time for the stage that was to take him to his train, we would have to run for it. And that, I suppose, was why we took so little notice of the landmarks going out, that, though I tried the very next afternoon, I could not find the trail again.

I wanted to find it too, for if I could once prove to Herman that there was a reality behind that sense of presence in the woods he credited to the whimseys of a literary imagination, I should somehow put myself in a better case for proving—well, I did not know quite what, but I wanted to find that trail.

I tried that day and the next. Twice I found the glade and the sun-steeped yerba buena, for the day was warm and the scent of it carried far, and once I got past Broken Tree, but I could never come into the trail in any manner.