While Joy replied she looked admiringly at the speaker. She was much taller than Joy, and very pretty, with long blue eyes, a creamy skin, and hair that was the very "golden-yellow" of the ballad. She might have been anywhere in the later twenties, but Joy learned afterwards that she was thirty-two. To Joy's eyes she was the fairy lady of the ballad come true; for she had evidently flung herself on her horse just as she was, in a green evening gown with a light cloak over it. Even in her anxiety for the child she had about her an atmosphere of bright serenity that made Joy in love with her. "I was just going to ask you to go after him," Joy replied as she looked. "He went past here a few minutes ago. I'm sure he is too little to be riding alone." "He is indeed," said the golden lady, smiling. "Little villain! But it seems he doesn't think so! Which way did he go, please?" "Straight along this path," Joy answered, pointing. The lady sprang to her horse again. "Thank you," she called back, then more and more faintly, "I haven't much time--now, to be--grateful as I should be. We'll--come--back--" The last words were hardly distinguishable from the echo of the flying hoofs. The ballad-lady was gone. The whole thing seemed to Joy like something out of a pageant. She wondered if the lovely lady in green was the little boy's mother, or his sister or aunt. "It was a little like the Green Gnome poem, except that she was hunting for him, and that the little boy was pretty," she thought. In the poem the Gnome had turned to a "tall and comely man" when the lady kissed him. She liked the lady; there had been something so gay and friendly about her, just in those few words, that Joy's heart felt warmed. Very few people near her own age came close enough to stately little Joy to be as friendly as the lady had been--or as the wishing-ring man had been. "Somewhere," Joy decided happily, "there must be lots of people like them, if I could only find the place. I'm sure I shall some day." She sat on in the gathering twilight, waiting for them to return. As she sat the thought of the wishing-ring man came back again. Wherever he was, he was wishing her well, and remembering her--he had said--what was it--he'd had a "human five minutes" with her. Her heart beat unreasonably, as if he might be coming down the brown path in the twilight, this instant,--as if the golden lady might bring him back with her.