I could not help laughing at her demure little answers. "Why!" I exclaimed, "what a worldly little woman! And what is your name?"
"They call me Lucy Gray," she said, looking up into my face. I think my heart almost ceased to beat.
"Lucy Gray!" I repeated.
"Yes," she said most seriously, as if to herself, "in all this snow."
"'Snow,'" I said—"this is dewdrops shining, not snow."
She looked at me without flinching. "How else can mother see how I am lost?" she said.
"Why!" said I, "how else?" not knowing how to reach her bright belief. "And what are those thick woods called over there?"
She shook her head. "There is no name," she said.
"But you have a name—Lucy Gray; and you started out—do you remember?—one winter's day at dusk, and wandered on and on, on and on, the snow falling in the dark, till—Do you remember?"
She stood quite still, her small, serious face full to the east, striving with far-off dreams. And a merry little smile passed over her lips. "That will be a long time since," she said, "and I must be off home." And as if it had been but an apparition of my eyes that had beset and deluded me, she was gone; and I found myself sitting astride in the full brightness of the sun's first beams, alone.