"It's goin' to be washed anyways," she placated the housewifely instinct within her, and she ran in for the baby and set him on the blanket. One heart-breaking thing about this baby who was "not right" was that there were no answers in him. She had tried all the wiles of motherhood to show him how she loved him, and coax him to respond, not so much in actual sentience to her as a baby's rejoinder to the world he could see and touch. He had no answers. But this morning when the sun fell warmly on him and the breeze stirred his coppery hair, he did, it seemed, hear for an instant the voice of earth. He put out his fat hands and gurgled into a laugh. Tira went mad. She was immediately possessed by an overwhelming desire to hear him laugh again. She called to him, in little cooing shouts, she stretched out her arms to him, and then, when he would not be persuaded even to turn his head to her, she began to dance. Perhaps after the first step she really forgot about him. Perhaps the mother ecstasy ran into the ecstasy of spring. Perhaps, since she could not answer the lure of the woods by running to them that morning, the woods ran to her, the green magic of them, and threw their spell on her. She hardly saw what was about her, even the child. The cherry tree in bloom was a great whiteness at her right, the sun was a splendor, the breeze stirred her hair, and the child's head was a coppery ball she fixed her eyes upon. And while she waved her arms and danced, Martin, who had seen her from the road, and left his horse there, was coming toward her across the grass. Why could she not have seen him stop? Why was he nothing more than a tree trunk in the woods, standing there while she flung up her white arms and danced? The earth spirits may know. Pan might know. They had got Tira that day, released from her winter's chill. She did not, and still less Martin, his own blood rising with every pulse. "Hooray!" he yelled. "That's the talk."