At the Faun Man’s birth an angel and a witch attended. The angel brought him the supreme gift of making people love him. The witch made the gift fatal, by wishing that he might be loved not as a man, but as a woman is loved—with jealousy. So his friends were all enemies to each other because they had to share him. Even Canute was like that; he had to be chained when admirers were calling.

Strange company invaded the Happy Cottage. Women predominated—women who tried to treat the Faun Man as their property. They wore fluffy gowns and had fluffy manners; even their voices were fluffy. Their attitude was that of princesses who had journeyed into the wilderness to borrow something. They were a little annoyed by the country, and found it dirty. Very few of them addressed him as Mr. Arran; each invented a pet-name for him, which seemed to make him hers peculiarly. They were all consumed with a desire to touch him and to go on touching him, beating about him like birds about a lighthouse which shines out hospitably, but permits no entrance. Most of them mingled with their admiration a concerned and respectful sorrow. His lonely manner of living moved them to the depths. They formed individual and brilliant plans for the glorious reconstruction of his future—plans which these female geographers handed to him boastfully, as though they were maps of fascinating lands which awaited his exploring. For satisfactory exploration the presence of the female geographer was necessary.

Peter was usually forewarned that an invasion was in progress by the crescendo cackling which rushed out from doors and windows into the basking stillness of the garden. Then he would hear the mild protest of the Faun Man, “But, my dear lady, my dear lady—but really——” Harry would meet him by the hedge, his face flushed and his mouth sulky. Jerking his thumb across his shoulder he would whisper, “The Hissing Geese! Hark at ‘em! Ain’t it sickening?” Sometimes he’d call them the H. G. for brevity. He called them that because of the way in which they sat round his brother with their necks stretched out, all making sounds. He hated them unreasonably, and hated them to excess when they tried to curry favor with him by kissing. And yet, it was silly of him; with a few years added to his age, he would have found most of them pretty and quite suitable for loving.

Surliness on these occasions gave Harry a strong sympathy for Canute. If he had been a dog and unrestrained by chivalry, nothing would have pleased him better than to have bitten the ladies’ legs. He felt that it was unjust to chain Canute up as a reward for his loyalty. So usually, when Kay and Peter had arrived, the three of them would sneak round the cottage to the kennel and attempt a rescue. Then came the exciting escape through the garden, crouching low and stealing behind the flowers so as not to be observed, holding on to the collar of the Great Dane for fear he should break away and glut his anger. Sometimes they were heard above the rattle of tea-cups and the ladies would bunch themselves in the cottage window, like a nosegay, with the Faun Man in their centre. Then would follow a series of high-pitched questions and exclamations, fired off for the sake of noise. “What dear children! Is that your sister? Are they both your brothers? What a perfectly sweet dog!”

The “perfectly sweet dog” would growl and show his fangs, as much as to say, “Leave me out of it. Look after your legs. I wish I had half a chance of showing you how perfectly sweet I am.”

Where did they all come from, these amorous butterfly excursionists? Harry kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t going to tell, only—— Well, he hinted that they might be insincere experiments of the golden woman, sent to supplant her—sent because she knew they couldn’t do it. “And jolly good care she takes not to send the right one. Trust her.” Harry said it in a growl which he copied from Canute.

It wasn’t until they had entered the Haunted Wood and the green wall of bushes and make-believe had shut out intruders, that his ruffled spirit regained its levity. Then he’d light a fire, and play at Indians who had taken their revenge in scalps. Presently, if the Faun Man had been lucky in getting rid of his worries, he would join them. They would boil a kettle and have tea in the open, after which the Faun Man would light his pipe and smoke it, lying flat on his back. They knew what to expect. Soon he would sit up, press his tobacco down with a lean finger, pluck a twig out of the fire and use it as a match. Then, very deliberately, he would begin, “I remember, once upon a time.”

What a lot of magnificent things had happened once upon a time that he could remember! He had chased cattle thieves across the border and had come up with them, intending to shoot if necessary, only to find them such human fellows that he’d parted friends. “Human” was his word for describing the kind of people he liked, many of whom were disreputable. One night, when camping in the Canadian Rockies, a hundred miles from anywhere, a stranger had crept from the forest and shared his supper and blanket. They had talked of London, London street-songs and Leicester Square, till the stars were going out. Next morning he was wakened by a member of the North West Mounted Police who was hunting a murderer. The fugitive had already vanished. “A pity he’d killed some one,” said the Faun Man; “he was one of the most charmin’ chaps I ever met. Oh yes, he was caught and hanged.”

The Faun Man had played hide-and-seek with death in many quaint corners of the world—getting his “liver into whack,” he called it, and gathering “local color.” What local color might be, and why anyone should want to gather it, Peter didn’t understand. But he learnt that its gathering took you down into Mexico in search of secret gold, where Indians hid behind rocks and potted at you with poisoned arrows, and that it took you up to Fort Mackenzie with dogs to the very edge of the Arctic. While he listened to these stories of adventure, the shadows of the Haunted Wood lengthened, the river sang more boldly, evening fell, and the fire, from a pyramid of leaping flames, became a hollow land of scarlet which grew slowly gray, fluttering with little tufts of ashen moss and ashen feathers, until it at last lay charred and dead.

The Faun Man captured Peter’s imagination and affections. He filled him with strange new longings. He sent his spirit reaching out after unattainable perfections, whose lure and desire are both the glamour and torture of childhood. He made Peter want to be a man, so that he might be like him. The Faun Man was a stained-glass window which, when looked through, tinted and intensified life’s values. Peter was going through the experience of hero-worship which comes to most boys when sex is dawning, and they have not yet realized that its sole and splendid meaning is that woman shares the same world.

And yet there were moments when Peter almost feared his friend; his character was a sand-desert in which the track followed yesterday was soon wiped out. One day he would cry, “Ah, I know him!” and the next, “I know nothing.” The whole passionate urgency of a child’s heart in friendship is to know everything.

But the Faun Man was too big and elusive to be known by one person. Four walls could not contain him. He came into a house like a half-tamed animal—but where had he been, where had he come from? He had tricks, curious tricks, which linked him to the creatures which make their homes in the leaves and holes of the earth. He seldom sat on chairs, but huddled himself on the floor while he talked to you. He could sit for an hour, saying nothing. In the middle of a conversation he would jump up and go out without apology, as if he heard a voice which you had not heard. And he had. The sound of the wind told him something, the altered note of a thrush, the little shudder, scarcely perceptible, that ran through the flowers; to him they all said something. If you asked him what they said, he could not tell you. So it was no good wanting him to belong to you; he belonged out there.

To Peter, who had always been smiled at for his compassion, it was comforting to find some one as compassionate as himself. It removed the dread of abnormality. There was a nightingale which used to come every evening to sing in an apple-tree near the Happy Cottage. They used to wait for the romance of its silver voice slanting across the velvet dusk, as though it were a thing to be seen rather than heard. One night they waited; it did not come.

The Faun Man grew nervous. He could not rest; at last he went in search of it with Peter. Beneath the apple-tree they found it still warm, with its wings stretched out. And then the unexpected happened. Kneeling in the twilight beside the dead singer, as though music had departed forever from the earth, the Faun Man wept.

And yet the same man could be harsh in anger—that was how Peter found the fairy. On entering the cottage one afternoon he heard the sound of sobbing upstairs and a voice protesting, “I didn’t mean to do it. She drove me mad—you and she together. You don’t care for me—don’t care for me; and I love you better than anything in the world. Oh, do forgive me, kind Faun Man.”

A pause. Peter knew she was on her knees before him, kissing his hands. It was as though he could see her doing it. “But you did mean to do it, Cherry.” It was the Faun Man speaking deliberately and coldly. “You did it on purpose. It was stupid and babyish of you. It didn’t do her any harm, and it didn’t do you any good. I don’t want to see you, and I don’t like you any longer.”

A passionate voice declared, “If you say that again, I’ll kill myself.”

Again a pause. The door overhead opened; a wild thing came tearing down the stairs. Peter had a vision of something in skirts, something with an intense white face, tragic gray eyes and a mass of black flying hair. He was bumped into. In stepping backward he tripped against a chair. When he picked himself up and looked out into the garden she had disappeared—all he heard was the running of her swift feet growing fainter and fainter.

He gazed about the room, wondering what he ought to do. Should he steal back quietly to where he had left Kay and Harry, and pretend that he had seen nothing? His attention was arrested. So that was what had caused the disturbance? Every portrait of the golden woman had been torn from its place on the wall and trampled. While he hesitated, he heard the Faun Man descending. It was too late to go now.

The Faun Man entered without seeing him. His face was stern; two deep lines stretched like cuts from the nostrils to the corners of his mouth. He looked leaner than ever. He was already stooping over the ruined portraits when Peter addressed him. “Won’t you ever forgive her? Please do. Never to forgive a person, not forever and forever, seems so dreadful.”

The Faun Man jumped; his eyes, when they turned on Peter, were the eyes of a stranger. “And where did you come from? And who asked you for your opinion? You’d better get out.”

When he came to the plank which crossed the little river, Peter halted. Down Friday Lane he could hear the mouth-organ and, looking, could see Harry beating time with one hand while Kay danced to it. No, he didn’t want to join them. Harry would laugh at him for paying heed to one of the Faun Man’s moods. And Kay—why, if she guessed that he was unhappy, of course she’d become unhappy, too——. And that girl—she’d said that she was going to kill herself. He ran across the meadow to the Haunted Wood. She must be there. She shouldn’t do it.

Just where he entered, he stooped and picked up something white. She had dropped her handkerchief, so he knew that he was on the right track. He followed on tiptoe, afraid lest, if he overtook her suddenly, he might scare her. In the stealth of the pursuit a novel excitement came upon him. His eyes were glowing. His breath came and went pantingly. He had removed his cap; his curly hair lay ruffled on his forehead. He went forward timidly, half-minded to turn back, ashamed lest he might find her looking at him. As he penetrated deeper, the stillness grew and magnified ievery sound. Overhead the branches were woven closer together, shutting the sunlight out. An air of secrecy gathered round him. Birds, hopping out of his path under bushes, looked back at him knowingly. They knew what he did not know himself.

Out of sight, beyond him, there was the sound of moving. Leaves rustled; silence settled down. They rustled again. He followed. Then he heard the voice of the river—a little voice which grew louder. It sang to itself softly. It seemed to be trying to say something. Did it sing in lurement or warning? Now it seemed to be saying, “Turn back, turn back, turn back”; and now——. But he couldn’t make out the words.

He lifted his face above a clump of shrub-oak and found his eyes peering into hers. She was too startled to jump back from him; she gazed wide-eyed, with lips parted and one hand plucking at her breast. She saw a boy, swift and straight as an arrow, a boy who seemed to stand tiptoe with eagerness, who had the grace and strength of a Greek runner and the smooth skin and gentle mouth of a girl.

And Peter in looking at her saw a white face, sensitive as a flower’s; and a mouth, red as a cherry, long and drooping and curved; and two great gray eyes, clear and wistful in expression; and over the eyes, dark brows, like a bird’s wings spread for flight. Her black hair had broken loose and hung about her shoulders, giving her a touch of wildness. Across the whiteness of her forehead it brooded like a cloud. In the green church of the wood she seemed sacred to Peter.

She laughed throatily, breaking the suspense. “Oh, it’s only you.”

Peter stepped out of the underbrush. Then he saw that she had removed her shoes and stockings, and was standing on the edge of the little river. Her feet were wet and as small as her hands. They looked cold as marble in the green dusk. Why was it? More than anything else, the sight of her feet made him unhappy for her, made him want to care for her, made him want to bring a smile to her mouth.

“Yes, it’s only me,” he said; “but—but I wish it wasn’t. I’m sorry.”

She tossed her head, as though she were indignant with him for being sorry, but she looked at him slantingly, curiously and kindly. “Why should you be sorry? You don’t know who I am? You’re not sorry; you only say that.”

He protested. “But I am. I didn’t mean to overhear; but, you know, I heard what you said—— I was afraid you’d do it.”

She sat down, trailing her feet in the water. She was smiling now, secretly and to herself, as if she didn’t want him to know it. “It’s too little,” she pouted. “I couldn’t drown in that.”

Peter seated himself at her side, with his knees drawn up to his chin. When he spoke, it was with an air of grave confession. “I’m awfully glad it was too little.”

She turned her head, looking at him from under her long lashes provocatively; but he was staring straight before him with vacant eyes, as if something very sweet and awful were happening. She reached out her hand and touched him; she noticed how he trembled. “And if it hadn’t been too little, it wouldn’t have mattered—not to you.”

He didn’t answer her immediately. When he spoke it was slowly, as if each word hurt as he dragged it out. “It would have mattered, because then you wouldn’t have been in the world.”

“But you didn’t know that I was in the world this morning.”

He shook his head, as much as to tell her that her objection was quite beside the question. “I know that. But I think I should have missed you just the same, without knowing exactly what I was missing.”

She laughed outright, swaying against him and burying her hands in the green things growing. “You are funny—yes, and dear. I never met a boy like you. You didn’t really think——?”

He gazed at her wonderingly. Each time he looked at her, he found something new that was beautiful. It was her throat this time, long and delicate like a Lent lily. As he watched it, he could see how the laughter bubbled up inside it; he longed, with the instinct of a child, to lay his fingers on it.

“You didn’t really think——?”

He nodded. “That you were going to kill yourself? Yes—and weren’t you?”

She ceased laughing. “I don’t think so. I’m such a coward. And then,” she commenced laughing again, “killing yourself is such a worry—you can only do it once and, if you’re not careful, you don’t look pretty. I always want to look pretty. Do—do you think I’m pretty?”

He choked and swallowed. His mouth was dry. He couldn’t bring his voice to the surface. She drooped her face away from him, pretending to take offense. “You don’t. I can see that. You needn’t tell me.”

His words came with a rush. “I do! I do! I think, when God made you, He must have said to Himself, ‘I’ll make the most beautiful person—the most beautiful person I ever made.’ It was something like that He said.”

His quivering earnestness made her solemn. She hadn’t meant to stir him so deeply. “What an odd way of saying things you have. I don’t suppose God cared much about my making. He just had me manufactured with the rest.”

A warm hand slipped into hers and a shy voice whispered, “He made you Himself. I’m certain.”

She gazed at him, at the narrow sloping shoulders and the shining curly head. She felt very much a woman at the moment—years older than the handful of months which at most must separate them. She laid her cheek against his and slid her arm about him. “I’m so glad you’re not a man.”

He stared straight before him. “I shall be soon.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen next birthday.”

She drew him nearer to her. He was so young as that! “How old d’you think I am?”

He searched her face, trying to make her as near his own age as possible, and not to be mistaken. “Sixteen?” he suggested.

“Almost seventeen,” she said; “I’ll soon be twenty, And then——”

“And then,” he interrupted, “I’ll be eighteen—almost a man.”

She withdrew her face from his. “Stupid. I don’t want you to be a man. When you’re a man, I shan’t like you; you’ll become hard and masterful like... like the rest.”

“I shan’t.”

She relented. “No. I don’t think you will. But then it’ll be all different.”

Yes, it would all be different. Peter had been a child when, in the early summer, he had stumbled on the Happy Cottage. Until then he would have been perfectly contented to have gone on living at Topbury and to have been fifteen forever. It had scarcely occurred to him that childhood was a preparation which would soon be ended. He had never looked ahead—never realized that he, with all the generations of boys who had lived before him, must one day be a man. In a vague way he had known that once his father and mother had been young and protected, as he and Kay were young and protected. But it had seemed a fanciful legend. And now the great change, which formerly he would have dreaded, he yearned for. The ignorance and inexperience of being young, the habit grown people had of treating him as a person of no serious importance, galled him. It had begun with the Faun Man and his desire to be like him. It was ridiculous when he imagined his own appearance, but he wanted to be respected. These longings had not come home to him before—they had been a gradual growth of weeks and months. It was contact with a vitalizing personality that had done it, and listening to talks of strange lands and the doings of strong men. And now this girl——. To her he was no more than amusing. She could do and say to him things that she would never do or say to men. Yes, when he was older it would all be different. She had wakened him forever from the long and irrecoverable sleep of childhood. He might dose again, but he could never sink back into its deep unruffled calm and indifference. Was it this that the river had tried to tell him, when he had heard it singing, “Turn back, turn back, turn back”? It still sang, going round the white feet of the girl in little waves and eddies, but its voice was indistinct, like that of an old prophet, who mumbles a forgotten and disregarded message.

The girl at his side stirred. “What do they call you?”

And he returned the question. She leant her head away from him on her shoulder. “What do you think they call me? What name would suit me best? But you’d never guess. They call me Cherry, because my lips are red.”

Cherry, because her lips were red! And who were they, who had called her that? He felt jealous of them. They knew so much about her; he knew nothing. And here was the supreme marvel, that for years she had been walking in the same world and, until now, he had found no hint of her. He might have passed her in the street—might have come often within touching distance of her. Some of this he tried to say to her; she listened with a faint smile about her mouth. He fell silent, fearing that he had amused her by his sentiment.

She patted his hand. “D’you know, you’re rather wonderful? You put such private thoughts into words. Do you always think behind things like that?” Without waiting for him to reply, she continued, “But you never passed me in the street. You couldn’t have met me any earlier, because I’ve lived always in America. I was born there. That’s where I met——.” She did not name the Faun Man, but her face clouded. “I must be getting back,” she ended vaguely.

Outside the wood he would lose her—lose her because she had belonged to other people first. He would become again a schoolboy, tricycling out into the country with Kay. It would take years to become a man.

She stood up. “You must go now.”

How sweet and slight she looked, like a tall white flower swaying in the shadows. He had read in books of spirit-women who, in the bygone days of romance, had lifted up their faces from amid the bracken to lure knights aside from their quest; and the knights, having once kissed them, had lost them and hungered for their lips forever. He wanted to speak—wanted to say something true, wanted to tell her of this dynamic change that she had worked for him. All that he could say was, “Cherry”; and then, “But how shall I find you?”

“Find me!” she laughed, tiptoeing on her bare feet with her hands clasped behind her head. “Oh, you’ll find me,” she nodded.

“But promise.”

She half-closed her eyes, as though tired by his urgency. Then she threw her hands to her side. “I like you, Peter. I promise.”

Picking up her shoes and stockings she pushed back the bushes. “You’re not to follow.”

He listened. Was she standing there, hidden by the screen of leaves? He had not heard the rustle of her going. Suddenly the branches were thrust back, and again he saw her. Her eyes were alight with merriment and her mouth was puckered. “Oh, little Peter, if you’d only been older——”

Like a secret door in a green wall closing, the branches swished back. The wood muttered to itself as she went from him, and then fell so silent that it seemed to stand with its finger pressed against its mouth.