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it was a little low house, and the windows and doors were glowing like
new, warm flowers.

Yes, it was a house and a garden away there in the wood, but no path led
to it through the forest, and there was a strangeness about it as about
no house or garden Eric had ever seen.

Although no path led through the wood to the house, a path did run
through the garden to the low door stone. Eric went up it and stood
looking in at the door, which was open.

The glow of the house came from a leaping, jolly fire in a big stone
fire-place, and from half a dozen squat candles set in brackets around
the walls. It was the one lovely room that Eric had ever seen. It was so
large that he knew it must occupy the whole of the little house. But in
spite of all the brightness, the comers were dim and far.

There were two strange people there, or they were strange to Eric
because they were so different from any people he had ever known. One
was a young woman who sat sewing cross-legged on a settle at the side of
the fire-place. About her the strangest thing was her hair. It was not
like most women's,--long and twisted up on her head. It was short, and
curled back above her ears and across her forehead like flower-petals.
It was the color of the candle-flames. But her face was brown, and her
neck and long hands were brown, as though she had lived a long time in
the sun. Her eyes that were lifted and scarcely watching the work in her
hands, were very quiet and gray.

She was watching and talking to a little girl who was skipping back and
forth between a rough tea-table set near the fire and an open
cupboard-door in the wall. She was carrying dishes to the table, and now
and then stopping to stir something good-smelling which hung over the
fire in a pewter pot, with a strong bent twig for a handle.

The child was strange in a very different way from her mother. The
mother, one could see, was merry in spite of her quiet eyes. But the
child was pale. Her face was pale and little and round. Her hair was
pale, too, the color of ashes, and braided in two smooth little braids
hanging half way down her back. She moved with almost as much swiftness
as the fire-shadows, and as softly too.

Both mother and daughter were dressed in rough brown smocks, with narrow
green belts falling loosely,--strange garments to Eric. And their feet
were bare.

But stranger than the house, stranger than the people in it, was the
fact that the mother was talking