ried to the waist in
ferns. Her sleek, brown head had a devoted look; the whole of her
seemed to go with so sturdy an innocence towards those peopled and
uncanny glooms. Joyce rose to her knees to call her back.

"Joan!" she cried. The baby turned. "Joan! Come back; come back an'
be friends!"

Joan, maintaining her offing, replied with a gesture. It was a
gesture they had learned from the boot-and-knife boy, and they had
once been spanked for practicing it on the piano-tuner. The
boot-and-knife boy called it "cocking a snook," and it consisted in
raising a thumb to one's nose and spreading the fingers out. It was
defiance and insult in tabloid form. Then she turned and plodded on.
The opaque wall of the wood was before her and over her, but she knew
its breach. She ducked her head under a droop of branches, squirmed
through, was visible still for some seconds as a gleam of blue frock,
and then the ghostly shadows received her and she was gone. The wood
closed behind her like a lid.

Joyce, squatting in her place, blinked a little breathlessly to shift
from her senses an oppression of alarm, and settled down to wait for
her. At least it was true that nothing ever happened to Joan; even
when she fell into a water-butt she suffered no damage; and the wood
was a place to which they came every day.

"Besides," she considered, enumerating her resources of comfort;
"besides, there can't be such things as wood-ladies, really."

But Joan was a long time gone. The dome of pines took on an uncanny
stillness; the moving patches of sun seemed furtive and unnatural;
the ferns swayed without noise. In the midst of it, patient and
nervous, sat Joyce, watching always that spot in the bushes where a
blue overall and a brown head had disappeared. The under-note of
alarm which stirred her senses died down; a child finds it hard to
spin out a mood; she simply sat, half-dreaming in the peace of the
morning, half-watching the wood. Time slipped by her, and presently
there came Mother, smiling and seeking through the trees for her
babies.

"Isn't there a clock inside you that tells you when it's lunch time?"
asked Mother. "You're ever so late. Where's Joan?"

Joyce rose among the ferns, delicate and elfin, with a shy perplexity
on her face. It was difficult to speak even to Mother about
wood-ladies without a pretence of skepticism.

"I forgot about lunch," she said, taking the slim, cool hand which
Mother held out to her. "Joan's in