“I can’t help it,” said Joyce, sighing. “But I won’t go into the dark parts of the wood any more.” “Coward,” repeated Joan absently, but with a certain relish. “You wouldn’t like to go there by yourself,” cried Joyce. “If I wasn’t with you, you’d be a coward too. You know you would.” She stopped, for Joan had swept her lap free of débris and was rising to her feet. Joan, for all her plumpness and infantile softness, had a certain deliberate dignity when she was put upon her mettle. She eyed her sister with a calm and very galling superiority. “I’m going there now,” she answered; “all by mineself.” “Go, then,” retorted Joyce angrily. Without a further word, Joan turned her back and began to plough her way across the ferns toward the dark wood. Joyce, watching her, saw her go, at first with wrath, for she had been stung, and then with compunction. The plump baby was so small in the brooding solemnity of the pines, thrusting indefatigably along, buried to the waist in ferns. Her sleek brown head had a devoted look; the whole of her seemed to go with so sturdy an innocence toward those peopled and uncanny glooms. Joyce rose to her knees to call her back. “Joan!” she cried. The baby turned. “Joan! Come back; come back an’ be friends!” Joan, maintaining her offing, replied only with a gesture. It was a gesture they had learned from the boot-and-knife boy, and they had once been spanked for practising it on the piano-tuner. The boot-and-knife boy called it “cocking a snook,” and it consisted in raising a thumb to one’s nose and spreading the fingers out. It was defiance and insult in tabloid form. Then she turned and plodded on. The opaque wall of the wood was before her and over her, but she knew its breach. She ducked her head under a droop of branches, squirmed through, was visible still for some seconds as a gleam of blue frock, and then the ghostly shadows received her and she was gone. The wood closed behind her like a lid. Joyce, squatting in her place, blinked a little breathlessly to shift from her senses an oppression of alarm, and settled down to wait for her. At least it was true that nothing ever happened to Joan; even when she fell into a water-butt she suffered no damage; and the wood was a place to which they came every day. “Besides,” she considered, enumerating her resources of comfort; “besides, there can’t be such things as wood-ladies _really_.”