also--illusion? Had she
no more reality than the loveliness of the forest? He opened his lips to
speak, but a strained excited voice sounded in his ears. "Who are you?"
Had he spoken? The voice had come as if from another, like the sound of
one's words in fever.

The girl smiled again. "English!" she said in queer soft tones. "I can
speak a little English." She spoke slowly, carefully. "I learned it
from"--she hesitated--"my mother's father, whom they call the Grey
Weaver."

Again came the voice in Dan's ears. "Who are you?"

"I am called Galatea," she said. "I came to find you."

"To find me?" echoed the voice that was Dan's.

"Leucon, who is called the Grey Weaver, told me," she explained smiling.
"He said you will stay with us until the second noon from this." She
cast a quick slanting glance at the pale sun now full above the
clearing, then stepped closer. "What are you called?"

"Dan," he muttered. His voice sounded oddly different.

"What a strange name!" said the girl. She stretched out her bare arm.
"Come," she smiled.

Dan touched her extended hand, feeling without any surprise the living
warmth of her fingers. He had forgotten the paradoxes of illusion; this
was no longer illusion to him, but reality itself. It seemed to him that
he followed her, walking over the shadowed turf that gave with springy
crunch beneath his tread, though Galatea left hardly an imprint. He
glanced down, noting that he himself wore a silver garment, and that his
feet were bare; with the glance he felt a feathery breeze on his body
and a sense of mossy earth on his feet.

"Galatea," said his voice. "Galatea, what place is this? What language
do you speak?"

She glanced back laughing. "Why, this is Paracosma, of course, and this
is our language."

"Paracosma," muttered Dan. "Para--cosma!" A fragment of Greek that had
survived somehow from a Sophomore course a decade in the past came
strangely back to him. Paracosma! Land-beyond-the-world!

Galatea cast a smiling glance at him. "Does the real world seem
strange," she queried, "after that shadow land of yours?"

"Shadow land?" echoed Dan, bewildered. "_This_ is shadow, not my world."

The girl's smile turned quizzical. "Poof!" she retorted with an
impudently lovely pout. "And I suppose, then, that _I_ am the phantom
instead of you!" She laughed. "Do I seem ghostlike?"

Dan made no reply; he was puzzling over unanswerable questions as he
trod behind the lithe figure of