is my turn now to lead you," she smiled. As before, the words were
gibberish, but the penetrating stare of those strange white eyes gave
them a meaning in the depths of his brain.

Automatically his hand went out to hers. He was a little dazed, and her
eyes were very compelling. Her fingers twined in his and she set off
over the flowery grass, pulling him beside her. He did not ask where
they were going. Lost in the dreamy spell of the still, gray, enchanted
place, he felt no need for words. He was beginning to see more clearly
in the odd, blurring twilight that ran the outlines of things together
in that queer, tapestried manner. And he puzzled in a futile, muddled
way as he went on over what sort of land he had come into. Overhead was
darkness, paling into twilight near the ground, so that when he looked
up he was staring into bottomless deeps of starless night.

Trees and flowering shrubs and the flower-starred grass stretched
emptily about them in the thick, confusing gloom of the place. He could
see only a little distance through that dim air. It was as if they
walked a strip of tapestried twilight in some unlighted dream. And the
girl, with her lovely, luminous body and richly colored robe of hair was
like a woman in a tapestry too, unreal and magical.

After a while, when he had become a little adjusted to the queerness of
the whole scene, he began to notice furtive movements in the shrubs and
trees they passed. Things flickered too swiftly for him to catch their
outlines, but from the tail of his eye he was aware of motion, and
somehow of eyes that watched. That sensation was a familiar one to him,
and he kept an uneasy gaze on those shiftings in the shrubbery as they
went on. Presently he caught a watcher in full view between bush and
tree, and saw that it was a man, a little, furtive, dark-skinned man who
dodged hastily back into cover again before Smith's eyes could do more
than take in the fact of his existence.

After that he knew what to expect and could make them out more easily:
little, darting people with big eyes that shone with a queer, sorrowful
darkness from their small, frightened faces as they scuttled through the
bushes, dodging always just out of plain sight among the leaves. He
could hear the soft rustle of their passage, and once or twice when they
passed near a clump of shrubbery he thought he caught the echo of little
whispering calls, gentle as the rustle of leaves and somehow full of a