"How do you know that?"
"You could not have got so far into this wood if it were not so; and I
am trying to find out some trace of it in your countenance. I think I
see it."
"What do you see?"
"Oh, never mind: I may be mistaken in that."
"But how then do you come to live here?"
"Because I too have fairy blood in me."
Here I, in my turn, looked hard at her, and thought I could perceive,
notwithstanding the coarseness of her features, and especially the
heaviness of her eyebrows, a something unusual--I could hardly call it
grace, and yet it was an expression that strangely contrasted with
the form of her features. I noticed too that her hands were delicately
formed, though brown with work and exposure.
"I should be ill," she continued, "if I did not live on the borders of
the fairies' country, and now and then eat of their food. And I see by
your eyes that you are not quite free of the same need; though, from
your education and the activity of your mind, you have felt it less than
I. You may be further removed too from the fairy race."
I remembered what the lady had said about my grandmothers.
Here she placed some bread and some milk before me, with a kindly
apology for the homeliness of the fare, with which, however, I was in no
humour to quarrel. I now thought it time to try to get some explanation
of the strange words both of her daughter and herself.
"What did you mean by speaking so about the Ash?"
She rose and looked out of the little window. My eyes followed her; but
as the window was too small to allow anything to be seen from where I
was sitting, I rose and looked over her shoulder. I had just time to
see, across the open space, on the edge of the denser forest, a single
large ash-tree, whose foliage showed bluish, amidst the truer green of
the other trees around it; when she pushed me back with an expression
of impatience and terror, and then almost shut out the light from the
window by setting up a large old book in it.
"In general," said she, recovering her composure, "there is no danger in
the daytime, for then he is sound asleep; but there is something unusual
going on in the woods; there must be some solemnity among the fairies
to-night, for all the trees are restless, and although they cannot come
awake, they see and hear in their sleep."