ood in her customary workmanlike fashion, and
between helpings answered questions in a fashion which only served to
darken the mystery of her absence.

"But there aren't any wood-ladies really, darling," remonstrated
Mother.

"There is," said Joan. "There's lots. They wanted to keep me but I
wouldn't stay. So I comed home, 'cause I was hungry."

"But," began Mother. "Where did they take you to?" she asked.

"I don't know," said Joan. "The one what I went to speak to gave me
her hand and tooked me to where there was more of them. It was a
place in the wood wiv grass to sit on and bushes all round, and they
gave me dead flowers to play wiv. Howwid old dead flowers!"

"Yes," said Mother. "What else?"

"There was anuvver little girl there," went on Joan. "Not a wood-lady
but a girl like me, what they'd tooked from somewhere. She was
wearing a greeny sort of dress like they was, and they wanted me to
put one on too. But I wouldn't."

"Why wouldn't you?" asked Joyce.

"'Cause I didn't want to be a wood-lady," replied Joan.

"Listen to me, darling," said Mother. "Didn't these people whom you
call wood-ladies take you away out of the wood? We searched the whole
wood, you know, and you weren't there at all."

"I was," said Joan. "I was there all the time, an' I heard Walter an'
Jenks calling. I cocked a snook at them an' the wood-ladies laughed
like leaves rustling."

"But where did you sleep last night?"

"I didn't sleep," said Joan, grasping her spoon anew. "I'se very
sleepy now."

She was asleep as soon as they laid her in bed, and Mother and Joyce
looked at each other across her cot, above her rosy and unconscious
face.

"God help us," said Mother in a whisper. "What is the truth of this?"

There was never any answer, any hint of a solution, save Joan's. And
she, as soon as she discovered that her experiences amounted to an
adventure, began to embroider them, and now she does not even know
herself. She has reached the age of seven, and it is long since she
has believed in anything so childish as wood-ladies.

IV

A MAN BEFORE THE MAST

In Tom Mowbray's boarding-house, the sailors who sat upon the narrow
benches round the big room ceased their talk as the door opened and
Tom Mowbray himself entered from the street. The men in the room, for
all the dreary stiffness of their shore-clothes, carried upon their
faces, in their hands shaped to the rasp of ropes, in every attitude
of their bodies, the in