"All right, Dryad!" I returned, cheerily. "Now tell me where that road
goes."
My aim was to bring her mind back to its accustomed channel for the
present. She brightened at my query.
"T' 'Ebron," she said.
"Oh! Yes! Some day soon I'm going there. I have a garden at home and I'm
going there to buy seed."
She laughed at this, and I felt relieved.
"Good-by, Dryad."
I knelt on the tree, bent down and took her upheld hand in mine. It was
warm, soft, and, that moment, clinging. Forerunners of dusk had come,
and the gray pools of her clear eyes made me release her hand and get on
my feet.
She moved away, and as I turned to set my face in the opposite
direction, something halted me in the very act.
On the Hebron road, two hundred yards or more distant, I saw the figure
of a man. A young, tall, bareheaded, roughly clad man, standing very
straight and still. He saw me; he was looking at me. Of that I was sure.
His position was by a great stone, which cast him in deeper shadow.
There was something portentous in his attitude, natural though it was. I
stopped and returned his inspection of me, but he made no sign, no
gesture. He might have been a tree of the forest, for all of his
immobility. A feeling, not of fear, but of premonition, swept over me as
I went on across the tree.