All at once there came a sudden coolness upon his face and a quick rustling above their heads. The wind was rising. Oh, this was what he had been craving for, ever since his return to Preston Lane! It had been⁠—he knew it now⁠—something in the heaviness of this windless air that had caused half his trouble. Had this cool wind been blowing when he crossed the threshold, everything would have been different. It was the wind he wanted, the wind, the wind; to blow away all odious eidolons of Bob Weevil’s presence out of his “sober house”!

He permitted the leafy ash-twigs that he had been bending to swing back to their natural position; and snatching at Gerda’s arm above the wrist, he drew the girl, like a captive, right up to the trunk of the great overshadowing tree. She remained still passive, gentle, unresisting, by his side, her head drooping a little, her whole being⁠—so it seemed⁠—lost in a calm untroubled quiescence. Holding her thus, but turning away from her, he rubbed the palm of his free hand up and down over the hard slightly-indented surface of the ash-trunk, whose bark, thin and tightly fitted, raised no barrier between his human touch and the tree’s own firm, hard wood-flesh.