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But among them there were other warriors, green recruits, whose flexible youth had so battled with wind and weight of ice that the branches, twisted, deformed, bowed to earth, were still green. Sap flowed in them. They were one with the living trunk.

In some dim way the lesson of those young hemlocks went home to Una. Her lower lip sagged as she looked at them. Some part of her—some part of her—she began to feel it—was twisted by curiosity, over-wrought fancy, away from her normal self. But it was not broken off.

Suddenly—elastically—it sprang back into place: “I w-won’t go any further—after it; I won’t!” she cried aloud—and turned her head to look around.

It was then that she got the crowning shock: yet as delicate, as fairy-like—as full of glamour—as the others had been.

Something fell at her feet. A little bunch of dewy wild flowers.

Lace of the carroway, gemmed with dew, lavender wild geranium, its cheek on her shoe, a lingering woodland violet with a tear in her eye, buttercup, dandelion—ebony-stemmed maidenhair, fairy-like in its pleading.