One night in April when Old Gerard's gray beard was still brown, the door of the shed was pushed open, letting in not only the winds of Spring but a woman wrapped in a green cloak, with a lining of cherry-color and a border of silver flowers and golden cherries. In one hand she swung a crystal lantern set in a silver frame, but it had no light in it; and in the other she held a small slip of a cherry-tree, but it had no bloom on it. Her dress was white, or had been; for the skirts of it, and her mantle, were draggled and sodden, and her green shoes stained and torn, and her long fair hair lay limp and dank upon her mantle whose hood had fallen away, and the shadows round her blue eyes were as black as pools under hedgerows thawing after a frost, and her lovely face was as white as the snowbanks they bed in. Behind her came another woman in a duffle cloak, a crone with eyes as black as sloes, and a skin as brown as beechnuts, and unkempt hair like the fireless smoke of Old Man's Beard straying where it will on the November woodsides. She too was wet and soiled, but full of life where the young one seemed full of death. The Shepherd looked at this strange pair and said surlily, "What want ye?" "Shelter," replied the crone. She pushed the lady, who never spoke, into the shed, and took from her shoulders the wet mantle, and from her hands the lantern and the tree; and led her to the Shepherd's bed and laid her down. Then she spread the mantle over the Shepherd's bench and, "Lie there," said she, "till love warms ye." Next she hung the lantern up on a nail in the wall, and, "Swing there," said she, "till love lights ye." Last she took the Shepherd's trowel and went outside the shed, and set the cherry-slip beside the door. And she said: "Grow there, till love blossoms ye." After this she came inside and sat down at the bedhead. Gerard the Shepherd, who had watched her proceedings without word or gesture, said to himself, "They've come through the floods." He looked across at the women and raised his voice to ask, "Did ye come through the floods?" The lady moaned a little, and the crone said, "Let her be and go to sleep. What does it matter where we came from by night? By daybreak we shall both of us be gone no matter whither."