“I’m a Halstedite still!” she said ruefully. “I’ve no right to Watters until lean make little pictures out of the smell of burnt wood and the flicker of a farthing dip--until sight and sound and scent are all mixed more or less into one. At present, when I wake to a slow Scotch drizzle, I don’t smell violets, or see mushrooms rushing up, or hear cabbages taking long drinks, but I’ve got to learn. Do you think I might ask the fairies to put me up to a thing or two--what ‘fog’ means, for instance, and ‘hoggin’ taties,’ and ‘a good tommy-spot’; and how you ‘kill’ hay, and why the weather is always wrong for turnips? Let me through, Daddy dear, and I’ll see if they’ve anything to say to me!” Hamer slipped a bar and let her slide past, and with a laugh she stepped on limber feet into the circle, a fairy-thing herself in her white gown, with the yellow light on her uncovered hair. But even as she caught her dress in her fingers and pointed a foot, she checked, her lips parted, her ear bent to listen. Lancaster’s trap, long lost in the myriad turns of the Lane, had emerged into the open road, and the horse’s hoofs, quickened to a sharp trot, rang from hill to hill. There are things to be read from a hoof-beat in the country quiet. Up in the Dales, when a man gallops, the farmers come to their doors, knowing he rides for succour. Lanty’s trot spelt urgency, and more than one voice hailed him as he passed. They heard him answer without stopping; saw the far-off lamps flung on the dark borders; heard the hoofs dwindle and quicken and finally die. Hamer’s wise eyes were on Dandy as she stood, her head stooped for the last message. She had forgotten him as well as the fairies, and her face, in its unconscious revelation, was neither that of a spirit nor of the little girl he loved, but the face of a woman come into her kingdom. With a passionate sense of loss, he strode over and lifted her out of the Ring. CHAPTER XII THE REAL THINGS