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 crucifixes. A long way off, through the opening at the end of the Forest, were the little lights of Mitten Island.
"Do you know," said Richard—and this is unfortunately the sort of thing that young men do say at silent and enchanted moments—"that if all the magic in this Forest were collected together and compressed into a liquid form, it would be enough to stop the War in one moment?"
"My hat!" said Sarah Brown. "In one moment?"
"In one moment."
"My hat!" said Sarah Brown.