ew their spell on
her. She hardly saw what was about her, even the child. The cherry tree
in bloom was a great whiteness at her right, the sun was a splendor, the
breeze stirred her hair, and the child's head was a coppery ball she
fixed her eyes upon. And while she waved her arms and danced, Martin,
who had seen her from the road, and left his horse there, was coming
toward her across the grass. Why could she not have seen him stop? Why
was he nothing more than a tree trunk in the woods, standing there while
she flung up her white arms and danced? The earth spirits may know. Pan
might know. They had got Tira that day, released from her winter's
chill. She did not, and still less Martin, his own blood rising with
every pulse.

"Hooray!" he yelled. "That's the talk."

He made a stride and Tira darted back. But it was not she he ran toward.
It was the child. He bent to the baby, caught him up and tossed him
knowingly and the baby, again incredibly, laughed. Tira, taken aback at
the sight of Martin, like a sudden cloud on her day, was arrested, in
her first rush toward him, by the pretty laugh. Her baby in Martin's
hands: that was calamity unspeakable. But the child had laughed. She
would hardly have known what price she would refuse even to the most
desperate of evil spirits that could conjure up that laugh. She stood
there breathless waiting on the moment, afraid of the event yet not
daring to interrupt it, and Martin tossed the baby and the baby laughed
again, as if it were "right." For Martin himself, except as the
instrument of the miracle, she had hardly a thought. It might have been
a hand out of heaven that had caught up the child, a hand from hell. But
the child laughed. Martin, for the interval, was neither malevolent nor
calculating. This was not one of his impish pleasantries. It might have
been in the beginning, but he was enormously flattered at having touched
the spring of that gurgling delight. For this was, he knew, a solemn
baby. He had glanced at it, when he came Tira's way, but only carelessly
and with no idea it was not like all babies. He supposed they began to
take notice sometime, when they got good and ready. Queer little devils!
But he was as vain and eager in his enjoyment of the response to his own
charm as he was prodigal in using it. The spring day had got into his
blood, too, and when he saw Tira dancing, the baby a part of the bright
picture, he had taken the little devil up, with no purpos