“But I do smell them. Anyway, I feel them coming. Let’s dance. Come, let’s dance to meet them.” Ariel’s happiness was overflowing, bubbling up before these children. All the morning, since waking and discovering that happiness had come to her in sleep, she had held it still, within herself. But now this unexpected meeting with the children, and more particularly Nicky’s glad-grave eyes, had broken down her reserve. She was at one with the children, as spontaneous as they in what she said and did. “Come, dance,” she laughed, wrinkling her eyes like a merry little girl, eyes very narrow, very green in the sunlight, and snatched at their hands. But they were new at this game. _They_ did not dance as easily as they laughed or sang to express their happiness. And their clumsy overshoes dragged over the ground. Ariel let them go. Stood for a minute, let down by them. “You dance!” Persis cried. “Dance like your feather danced in the wind on deck. Be a feather. Nicky says you and the feather are really twins, only the feather has been magic’d.” “No,” Nicky denied calmly, and still grave. “I said _she_ had been magic’d into a human. She and the fairy feather were twins before the magicking. You are mixed up, Persis.” “Oh, no,” Ariel assured them quickly. “I’m a real girl. I haven’t been magic’d from something else. Truly. But I’ll dance.” She slipped out of her coat, tossed it behind her into the snowy woods whence she had appeared to the children. It lay in a heap there on the wet snow, hardly distinguishable from snow in its own whiteness. But a touch of the scarlet lining—it might have been crushed red winterberries, though—gave it away. She threw her green hat down somewhere else. Kicked her rubbers off anywhere. And began to dance. She danced to meet the violets. She danced right through the leaf mold into their golden mysterious hearts. And the music she danced to was the unheard rhythms of earth and sky and woods. But sometimes she hummed, beelike, beneath her breath. Her clinging green jersey frock etched her figure sharply against the black-violet-white background of the woods. Two hairpins slipped down her neck, and then her hair was of the rhythm. Pale gold on the air. Like March sunshine. Soon the patterns of the rhythms she was attuned to took her in wider and wider circles. Then crescents. Then stars. The children backed away farther and farther from the reach of the dance, but never for an instant did their fascinated eyes leave the heart of the lovely patterns of music and stars and moons, the heart that was the dancing Ariel. They knew that she was dancing happiness, that all this glamour and beautifulness of motion and that low humming they heard sometimes through it all, were happiness. But they thought it came from their own hearts. They scarcely separated their happiness, while she danced, from the dancer’s. She was their happiness come out of their hearts into form and motion.