She answered with a sob he did not hear, so keen his thrall to the enchantment. No sign of human habitation lay around except the gravelled walks; the castle towers were hid, the boat-strewn sea was on their left no more. Only the clumps of trees were there, the mossy grass, the flowers whose beauty and plenteousness mocked the posie in the girl’s hands. They walked now silent, expectant every moment of the exit that somehow baffled, and at last they came upon the noble lawn. It stretched from their feet into a remote encroaching eve, no trees beyond visible, no break in all its grey-green flatness edged on either hand by wood. And now the sky had many stars. Their gravelled path had ceased abruptly; before them the lawn spread like a lake, and they were shy to venture on its surface. “Let us go on; I must go home, I am far from home,” said Nan, in a trepidation, her flowers shed, her eyes moist with tears. And into her voice had come a strain of dependence on the boy, an accent more pleasing than any he had heard in her before. “We must walk across there,” he said, looking at the far-off vague edge; but yet he made no move to meet the wishes of the girl now clinging to his arm. “Come, come,” said she, and pressed him gently at the arm; but yet he stood dubious in the dusk. “Are you afraid?” she asked, herself whispering, she could not tell why. He felt his face burn at the reflection; he shook her hand off almost angrily. “Afraid!” said he. “Not I; what makes you think that? Only--only----” His eyes were staring at the lawn. “Only what?” she whispered again, seeking his side for the comfort of his presence. “It is stupid,” he confessed, shame in his accent, “but they say the fairies dance there, and I think we might be looking for another way.” At the confession, Nan’s mood of fear that Gilian had conferred on her was gone. She drew back and laughed with as much heartiness as at his story of the heron’s nest. The dusk was all around and they were all alone, lost in a magic garden, but she forgot all in this new revelation of her companion’s strange belief. She turned and ran across the lawn, crying as she went, “Follow me, follow me!” and Gilian, all the ecstasy of that lingering moment on the edge of fancy gone, ran after her, feeling himself a child of dream, and her the woman made for action. A sadden opening in the thicket revealed the shore, the highway, the quay with its bobbing lamps, the town with its upper windows lighted. At the gateway of the garden the Cornal met them, He was close on them in the dusk before he knew them, and seeing Gilian he peered closely in the girl face. “Who’s this?” said he abruptly. Gilian hesitated, vaguely fearing to reveal her identity, and Nan shrank back, all her memories of conversation in Maam telling her that here was an enemy.