illuminated by a little red light on his breast,
and a little green light on his tail. Richard was fond of making
elaborate and unnecessary arrangements like this, while neglecting to
acquire skill in the more usual handicrafts.

Sarah Brown, a person of little weight, was placed astride on the back
of the Horse Vivian. Richard walked beside. The dragon nodded good-bye,
and disappeared into its home, a low tunnel-like barn, evidently built
specially for it, with a door at each end, and a conveniently placed
chimney which enabled it to breathe enough fire to cook its meals
without suffocating itself.

Sarah Brown never saw the dragon again, but it stayed always in her
memory as a puzzled soul born tragically out of its time, a shorn lamb,
so to speak, to whom the wind had not been sufficiently tempered.

Now this ride home, through the Enchanted Forest, on a tall horse, with
Richard walking beside her, was the most perfect hour of Sarah Brown's
life.

The Enchanted Forest is only an accumulation of dreams, and from every
traveller through it it exacts toll in the shape of a dream. By way of
receipt, to every traveller it gives a darling memory that neither death
nor hell nor paradise can efface.

Sarah Brown knew that her dream and Richard's could never meet. The fact
that he was thinking of some one else all the way home was not hidden
from her. But she was a person used to living alone, she could enjoy
quite lonely romances, and never even envy real women, whose romances
were always made for two. She was not a real woman, she was morbidly
bodiless. Strange though it may seem, the kind, awkward, absent-minded
touch of Richard as he had lifted her on to the Horse Vivian's back had
been for her the one flaw in that enchanted ride. She could not bear
touch. She had no pleasure in seeing or feeling the skin and homespun
that encloses men and women. She hated to watch people feeding
themselves, or to see her own thin body in the mirror. She ought really
to have been born a poplar tree; a human body was a gift wasted on her.

As they passed along the Green Ride, the red light from the Horse
Vivian's neck made a sort of heralding ghost before them on the grass.
Bats darted above them for a few yards at a time, and were twitched
aside as though by a string or a reminding conscience. The telegraph
wires, bound for the post office of Faery, run through the Enchanted
Forest, and the poles in the faint light were like tall cr