I've shears and a saw here, and if you'll show me what you want cut down"
"You go with him, Alayne," said Eden. "It's so beastly foggy out. I'll stop here and see if I can do anything with this."
Renny glanced at the pad on Eden's knee. What was written looked like poetry. Good Lord, was he at it again! Renny had hoped that his illness might have cured him of this other disability. But no, while Eden lived he would make verse, and trouble.
Outside, the fog still enveloped the woodland, delicate and somnolent. The pale moonlike sun scarcely illumined it. The drip of moisture from leaves mingled with the muted murmur of the spring.
"It's rather a strange morning," said Alayne, "to have chosen for cutting things. It will be hard to know what the effect will be." She thought: "We are alone, shut in by the fog. We might be the only two on earth."
"Yes," he agreed, in an equally matter-of-fact tone. "It's a queer morning. The branches seem to spring out from nowhere. However, that won't prevent their being lopped off." He thought: "Her face is like a white flower. I wonder what she would say if I were to kiss her. The little hollow of her throat would be the place."
She looked about her vaguely. What was it she wanted him to do? The path, yes. "This path," she said, "should be widened. We get so wet."
He followed it with his eyes. Safer than looking at her. "I'd need a scythe for that. I'll send one of the men around this afternoon and he'll cut down all that growth. Now I'll thin out these long branches."
Before long, boughs, heavy with their summer growth, lay all about. And all about green mounds of low growing things: dogwood, with its waxen berries; elderberry, its fruit just going red; sumach, the still green plumes of which were miniature trees in themselves; aconite, still in flower; and long graceful trailers of the wild grape. And wherever he had stridden, in his heavy boots, tender growths lay crushed. His dogs ran here and there,
