There came a sound, like a silvery laugh wedded to a harsh cackle, and this was followed by the swift patter of running feet, tapping in a muffled tread the moss- and leaf-strewn ground. I thrust out my head to see what these strange sounds meant. God above! The Dryad and the Satyr, hand in hand, dashed by my hiding-place like a hurricane. She was next to me. What she wore I cannot say. It was something all white, girded at the waist with a vine, for I saw leaves and tendrils hanging from it. She had shaken her hair down. The Satyr was without his hat, and his ragged coat streamed out as he tore along. I glimpsed his face, and it reflected honest merriment only. Just opposite me they laughed again, without apparent reason, as children do in a frolic, and how incongruous it sounded; Celeste's musical bell tones, and Jeff Angel's cracked and jarring voice. So, hand in hand, in perfect understanding and good-fellowship, these two Children of Nature romped through the moonlit lanes of their beloved woods, happy in their very wildness and unrestraint. Before I could recover from my profound astonishment they had disappeared down a misty aisle hung with trembling, diaphanous, luminous shadows; had merged with the pearl-gray gloom of the middle distance, and a wild, eerie strain of something which might well have been borrowed from a barbaric chant drifted back to my stunned sensibilities. I caught the notes only, but they drove through to my brain like fire-barbed arrows, and stung it into action. She had passed almost within reach of my arm! She! The one because of whom this awful abyss had opened up for me. She had passed, and I had stood like a dolt and let her go! "Lessie! Lessie!" I sprang forward, goaded by love and despair, and ran after them with all the swiftness I could command. "Dryad! Dryad!" I called, at the top of my voice, but no answer came. I stopped, and with hand against a tree held my breath to listen. Not a sound but my own blood hammering in my ears. Then as a full realization came to me of the opportunity which had been offered, and which I had stupidly missed, a feeling of mad recklessness seized me, and I bounded forward again, blindly, knowing only that somewhere ahead of me was Celeste. Once I saw something white, and rushed toward it with outheld arms and a strangled cry of gladness. It was a portion of a projecting earth-bank, covered with a growth bearing tiny white blossoms. The moon struck it full, and had worked the cruel deception. I fell upon the pure little flowers and tore them savagely; flung them down and ground my feet upon them, then took up my search once more. Rage filled my breast. Rage at myself, at Fate, at Granny, at Beryl Drane, and this animal emotion must have blinded my eyes, for in my headlong, methodless pursuit I at length ran full force into a huge beech, and dropped senseless at its feet.