Canterton followed a path that led into the larch wood where the thousands of grey black poles were packed so close together that the eye could not see for more than thirty yards. There was a faint and mysterious murmuring in the tree tops, a sound as of breathing that was only to be heard when one stood still. The ground was covered with thin, wiry grass of a peculiarly vivid green. The path curled this way and that among the larch trunks, with a ribbon of blue sky mimicking it overhead. The wood was called the wilderness, and even when a gale was blowing, it was calm and sheltered in the deeps among the trees. Canterton paused now and again to examine some of the larches. He had been working at the spruce gall aphis disease, trying to discover a new method of combating it, or of lighting upon some other creature that by preying upon the pest might be encouraged to extirpate the disease. The winding path led him at last to the lip of a large dell or sunken clearing. It was a pool of yellow sunlight in the midst of the green glooms, palisaded round with larch trunks, its banks a tangle of broom, heather, bracken, whortleberry, and furze. There was a boggy spot in one corner where gorgeous mosses made a carpet of green and gold, and bog asphodel grew, and the sundew fed upon insects. All about the clearing the woods were a blue mist when the wild hyacinth bloomed in May. Down below him in a grassy hollow a child with brilliant auburn hair was feeding a fire with dry sticks. She knelt intent and busy, serenely alone with herself, tending the fire that she had made. Beside her she had a tin full of water, an old saucepan, two or three potatoes, some tea and sugar twisted up together in the corner of a newspaper, and a medicine bottle half full of milk. “Hallo—hallo!” The auburn hair flashed in the sunlight, and the child turned the face of a beautiful and wayward elf. “Daddy!” She sprang up and raced towards him. “Daddy, come along. I’ve got to cook the supper for the fairies.” Canterton had never evolved a more beautiful flower than this child of his, Lynette. She was his in every way, without a shred of her mother’s nature, for even her glowing little head was as different from Gertrude Canterton’s as fire from clay. “Hallo, come along.” He caught her up with his big hands, and set her on his shoulder. “Now then, what about Princess Puck? You don’t mean to say the greedy little beggars have eaten up all that pudding we cooked them last night?” “Every little bit.” “It must have been good. And it means that we shall have to put on our aprons.”