“You won’t take the house, I’m thinking, sir? No. I wouldn’t myself, not for anything.... It would be like wearing clothes a person had died in. They never meant us to see these things all in their disabill. ’Tis bad enough to be haunted by the dead, but preserve me from the ghosts of the living. It is more fit for a Hospital, now, or a Home.... Those people were like a kind of spirits, like they used to see in olden time. They did not know the sorrow and wickedness of the world as it really is. ‘Can the rush grow up without noise? Can the flag grow without water? Whilst it is yet in his greenness, and not cut down, it withereth before any other herb.’ Yet you would think they meant to live for ever by the way they went about, young and old.... One night I was coming home late and I saw all these windows lit up, every one, and there were people in them all. It was as if the place was a hollow cloud with fire in it and people dancing. Only the red blind was down, and as bright as ever. It called to my mind a story the old Ann used to tell, about a fellow going home from a fair and seeing a grand, gorgeous house close by the road, and lovely people dancing and musicking in it, where there hadn’t been a house before of any kind. He went in and joined them and slept in a soft warm bed, but in the morning he woke up under a hedge. I sort of expected to see there wasn’t any house there next morning, it looked _that strange_.” While we were having tea in her parlour Mrs Smith showed us a photograph of “Miss Megan,” an elder sister of Jack and Roland, whom I had never heard of, nor I think had Mr Stodham. I shall not forget the face. She was past twenty, but clearly a fairy child, one who, like the flying Nicolete, would be taken for a fay by the wood-folk (and they should know). Her dark face was thin and shaped like a wedge, with large eyes generous and passionate under eyebrows that gave them an apprehensive expression, though the fine clear lips could not have known fear or any other sort of control except pity. The face was peering through chestnut leaves, looking as soft as a hare, but with a wildness like the hare’s which, when it is in peril, is almost terrible. I think it was a face destined to be loved often, but never to love, or but once. It could draw men’s lips and pens, and would fly from them and refuse to be entangled in any net of words or kisses. It would fly to the high, solitary places, and its lovers would cry out: “Oh, delicate bird, singing in the prickly furze, you are foolish, too, or why will you not come down to me where the valleys are pleasant, where the towns are, and everything can be made according to your desire?” Assuredly, those eyes were for a liberty not to be found among men, but only among the leaves, in the clouds, or on the waves, though fate might confine them in the labyrinth of a city. But not a word of her could I learn except once when I asked Ann straight out. All she