“’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 curiosity—the child’s avid curiosity for the supernatural—alight in her face. In the wood a breath of wind stirred the leaves; the shadows and the fretted lights shifted and swung; all was vague movement and change. Was it a bough that bent and sprang back or a flicker of draperies, dim and green, shrouding a tenuous form that passed like a smoke-wreath? She stared with wide eyes, and it seemed to her that for an instant she saw the figure turn and the pallor of a face, with a mist of hair about it, sway toward her. There was an impression of eyes, large and tender, of an infinite grace and fragility, of a coloring that merged into the greens and browns of the wood; and as she drew her breath it was all no more. The trees, the lights and shades, the stir of branches were as before, but something was gone from them.
“Joan,” she cried, hesitating.
“Yes,” said Joan, without looking up. “What?”
The sound of words had broken a spell. Joyce was no longer sure that she had seen anything.
“I thought, just now, I could see something,” she said. “But I s’pose I didn’t.”
“I did,” remarked Joan.