“Wood-ladies,” repeated Joyce, and turned with a little shiver to look across the ferns to where the pines ended and the lesser wood, dense with undergrowth, broke at their edge like a wave on a steep beach. It was there, in a tunnel of a path that writhed beneath overarching bushes, that she had been troubled with the sense of unseen companions. Joan, her fat hands struggling with another fern, followed her glance. “That’s where they are,” she said casually. “They like being in the dark.” “Joan!” Joyce spoke earnestly. “Say truly—truly, mind!—do you think there _is_ wood-ladies at all?” “’Course there is,” replied Joan cheerfully. “Fairies in fields and angels in heaven and dragons in caves and wood-ladies in woods.” “But,” objected Joyce, “nobody ever sees them.” Joan lifted her round baby face, plump, serene, bright with innocence, and gazed across at the tangled trees beyond the ferns. She wore the countenance with which she was wont to win games, and Joyce thrilled nervously at her certainty. Her eyes, which were brown, seemed to seek expertly; then she nodded. “There’s one now,” she said, and fell to work with her fern again. Joyce, crouching among the broad green leaves, looked tensely, dread and curiosity—the child’s avid curiosity for the supernatural—alight in her face. In the wood a breath of wind stirred the leaves; the shadows and the fretted lights shifted and swung; all was vague movement and change. Was it a bough that bent and sprang back or a flicker of draperies, dim and green, shrouding a tenuous form that passed like a smoke-wreath? She stared with wide eyes, and it seemed to her that for an instant she saw the figure turn and the pallor of a face, with a mist of hair about it, sway toward her. There was an impression of eyes, large and tender, of an infinite grace and fragility, of a coloring that merged into the greens and browns of the wood; and as she drew her breath it was all no more. The trees, the lights and shades, the stir of branches were as before, but something was gone from them. “Joan,” she cried, hesitating. “Yes,” said Joan, without looking up. “What?” The sound of words had broken a spell. Joyce was no longer sure that she had seen anything. “I thought, just now, I could see something,” she said. “But I s’pose I didn’t.” “I did,” remarked Joan. Joyce crawled through the crisp ferns till she was close to Joan, sitting solid and untroubled and busy upon the ground, with broken stems and leaves all round her. “Joan,” she begged. “Be nice. You’re trying to frighten me, aren’t you?” “I’m not,” protested Joan. “I did see a wood-lady. Wood-ladies doesn’t hurt you; wood-ladies are _nice_. You’re a coward, Joyce.”