One suddenly started up just at his elbow, and was away like the wind.  Ivra began to run and to call after it.  “Wild Star!  Silly Wild Star!  It’s only I, Ivra, and my playmate.  Wait for us!”

Eric followed her, running as fast as he could, but the snow held him back, and all the trees in the forest seemed to gather to stand in his way.  Ivra came back to him, laughing.  “They are so afraid of you!  No one will come near us until the Tree Man is there to protect him.”

Soon they came to a big beech-tree standing in an open space with smaller beeches making a circle around it.  The starlight showed, strangely, a narrow door in the trunk.  Ivra pushed it open and Eric followed in after her, wondering at going into a tree.

They were on a flight of stairs lighted by starlight from a window somewhere high up.  At the head of the flight they came to a door, and through the crack beneath it streamed a warmer light than starlight.  Ivra opened that door gayly, and through it with her, Eric went to his first party.

It was the jolliest room in all the world.  The firelight and candlelight did not reach so far as the walls, but left them in soft darkness.  So Eric had the feeling that the room was really much too large to be inside of a tree.  But in spite of its bigness, it was very cozy.  The fireplace was in the middle of the floor, just a great hollowed boulder, heaped with crackling twigs.

The candles, red, green, yellow, brown and orange, stood circlewise on a table by which the Tree Man sat, carving a doll out of a stick.  A workbasket on the table was overflowing with bright threads and pieces of queer cloth.

Eric saw these things because just for a minute he was too shy to look at the people in the room.  Almost at once he had to look at the Tree Man, however, for he came and shook him by the shoulders.  Eric had been shaken by the shoulders before, so he shrank away.  But this was very different from Mrs. Freg’s shakings.  The Tree Man was chuckling, not scolding, and the dark eyes that Eric looked up above the long white beard to find were friendly and wise.

“Do not fear us, little Earth Child,” he said.  “It is we that have cause to fear you.  You have only to blink your eyes, pretend to be knowing, and we are nothing.  But your eyes are so wide and so clear, we trust you.  Ivra told us there was not the tiniest shadow in them, not even the shadow of leaf.  Only hunger.  But we’re not afraid of hunger.  Come, have a good time at the party.”

Then the Tree Girl, the Tree Man’s daughter, came to him.  She was shy, and shook all her soft brown hair about her cheeks.  A circle of little yellow leaves kept her hair from her eyes, which, in spite of her bashfulness, were steady and kind like her father’s.  “I am glad you are here.” she said.  From that minute Eric felt at home in the tree.

Eric and Ivra were the first of the guests.  The others perhaps had been too scared to come.  But soon knock after knock sounded at the door, and in flocked the Forest People who had been invited.