The green dusk was multiplied many times now by tiny spruces, no thicker than a man's thumb, which grew up in racks and created a dense blackness, its edges pierced by quivering shafts of the sun, some of which, as if by special providence, fell between all the outer saplings, and struck far in. A certain dream sallowness was manifested in that sunlit glimpse. The air was quiet. Minutest things seemed to marshal themselves as if alone and unobserved, so that it was strange to spy them out.
"She is not here," he thought. His footfall was nothing on the soft mold. Portly trunks of the hemlocks began to bar his way. The thick shade entreated secrecy; he stood still, and saw his dryad, a green apparition, kneeling at the foot of a beech tree, and looking down. In the stillness, which absorbed all but the beating of his heart, he heard the dry tick, tick of a beech leaf falling. Those that still clung to the sleek upper boughs were no more than a delicate yellow cloud or glowing autumnal atmosphere suffusing the black bole of the tree with a light of pure enchantment. He was surprised that anything so vaporous and colorful should come from the same sap that circulated through the bark and body of the thick tree itself. But then he reflected that, after all, the crown and flame of Sam Dreed's life was Day Rackby.
Had she, perhaps, descended from that yellow cloud above her? Deep-water Peter had a moment of that speechless joy which comes when all the doors in the house of vision are flung open at one time.
His feet sank unheeded in a patch of mold. He saw now that her eye was on the silent welling of a spring into a sunken barrel. She had one hand curled about the rim. The arm was of touching whiteness against that cold, black round, which faithfully reflected the silver sheen of the flesh on its under parts. Red and yellow leaves, crimped and curled, sat or drifted to her breath in the pool, as if they had been gaudy little swans.
Suddenly the sun sent a pale shaft, tinctured with lustrous green, through the hemlock shades. This shaft of light moved over the forest floor, grew ruddy, spied out a secret sparkle hidden in a fallen leaf, shone on twisting threads of gossamer-like lines of running silver on which the gloom was threaded, and, last of all, blazing in the face of that fascinating dryad, caused her to draw back.
Peter, as mute as she, stretched out his arms. She darted past him in a flash, putting her finger to her lips and looking back. The light through the tiny spruces dappled her body; she stopped as if shot; he came forward, humble and adoring, thinking to crush into this moment, within these arms, all that mortal beauty, the ignis fatuus of romance.
His lips were parted. He seemed now to have her with her back against a solid wall of rock outcropping, green-starred; but next instant she had slipped into a cleft where his big shoulders would not go. Her eyes shone like crystals in that inviting darkness.
"What can I do for you?" said Peter, voicelessly.
Day Rackby pinched her shoulders back, leaned forward, and drew a mischievous finger round her throat.