cking up stiffly.
In this posture she continued the conversation undisturbed. "I know,
Joy. It was wood-ladies!"

"Wood-ladies!" Joyce frowned in faint perplexity as Joan rolled right
side up again. Wood-ladies were dim inhabitants of the woods, beings
of the order of fairies and angels and even vaguer, for there was
nothing about them in the story-books. Joyce, who felt that she was
getting on in years, was willing to be skeptical about them, but
could not always manage it. In the nursery, with the hard, clean
linoleum underfoot and the barred window looking out on the lawn and
the road, it was easy; she occasionally shocked Joan, and sometimes
herself, by the license of her speech on such matters; but it was a
different affair when one came to the gate at the end of the garden,
and passed as through a dream portal from the sunshine and frank sky
to the cathedral shadows and great whispering aisles of the wood.
There, the dimness was like the shadow of a presence; as babies they
had been aware of it, and answered their own questions by inventing
wood-ladies to float among the trunks and people the still, green
chambers. Now, neither of them could remember how they had first
learned of wood-ladies.

"Wood-ladies," repeated Joyce, and turned with a little shiver to
look across the ferns to where the pines ended and the lesser wood,
dense with undergrowth, broke at their edge like a wave on a steep
beach. It was there, in a tunnel of a path that writhed beneath
over-arching bushes, that she had been troubled with the sense of
unseen companions. Joan, her fat hands struggling with another fern,
followed her glance.

"That's where they are," she said casually. "They like being in the
dark."

"Joan!" Joyce spoke earnestly. "Say truly truly, mind! do you think
there is wood-ladies at all?"

"'Course there is," replied Joan, cheerfully. "Fairies in fields and
angels in heaven and dragons in caves and wood-ladies in woods."

"But," objected Joyce, "nobody ever sees them."

Joan lifted her round baby face, plump, serene, bright with
innocence, and gazed across at the tangled trees beyond the ferns.
She wore the countenance with which she was wont to win games, and
Joyce thrilled nervously at her certainty. Her eyes, which were
brown, seemed to seek expertly; then she nodded.

"There's one now," she said, and fell to work with her fern again.

Joyce, crouching among the broad green leaves, looked tensely, dread
and c