THE pine-trees of the wood joined their branches into a dome of intricate groinings over the floor of ferns where the children sat, sunk to the neck in a foam of tender green. The sunbeams that slanted in made shivering patches of gold about them. Joyce, the elder of the pair, was trying to explain why she had wished to come here from the glooms of the lesser wood beyond. “I wasn’t ’zactly frightened,” she said. “I knew there wasn’t any lions or robbers, or anything like that. But——” “Tramps?” suggested Joan. “No! You know I don’t mind tramps, Joan. But as we was going along under all those dark bushes where it was so quiet, I kept feeling as if there was—something—behind me. I looked round and there wasn’t anything, but—well, it felt as if there was.” Joyce’s small face was knit and intent with the efforts to convey her meaning. She was a slim erect child, as near seven years of age as makes no matter, with eyes that were going to be gray, but had not yet ceased to be blue. Joan, who was a bare five, a mere huge baby, was trying to root up a fern that grew between her feet. “I know,” she said, tugging mightily. The fern gave suddenly, and Joan fell over on her back, with her stout legs sticking up stiffly. In this posture she continued the conversation undisturbed. “I know, Joy. It was wood-ladies!” “Wood-ladies!” Joyce frowned in faint perplexity as Joan rolled right side up again. Wood-ladies were dim inhabitants of the woods, being of the order of fairies and angels and even vaguer, for there was nothing about them in the story-books. Joyce, who felt that she was getting on in years, was willing to be sceptical about them, but could not always manage it. In the nursery, with the hard clean linoleum underfoot and the barred window looking out on the lawn and the road, it was easy; she occasionally shocked Joan, and sometimes herself, by the license of her speech on such matters; but it was a different affair when one came to the gate at the end of the garden, and passed as through a dream portal from the sunshine and frank sky to the cathedral shadows and great whispering aisles of the wood. There the dimness was like the shadow of a presence; as babies they had been aware of it, and answered their own questions by inventing wood-ladies to float among the trunks and people the still green chambers. Now, neither of them could remember how they had first learned of wood-ladies.