Late that afternoon Helma and Ivra and Eric gathered ferns and flowers to deck themselves for the evening.  They put them on over the stream, which was the only mirror in the Forest.

Helma made a girdle of brakes for herself, and a dandelion wreath for her hair.  She wove a dear little cap of star flowers for Ivra, and a chain of them for her neck.  Eric crowned himself with bloodroot and contrived grass sandals for his feet.  But the sandals, of course, wore through before the end of the first dance and fell off.

They had a splendid supper of raspberries and cream, which they sat on the door stone to eat, and then told stories to each other, while they waited for the moon to rise.  It came early, big and round and yellow, shining through the trees, flooding the aisles of the Forest with silver light until they looked like still streams, and the trees like masts of great ships standing in them.

Then the three hurried away to the Tree Man’s.  They ran hand in hand through the forest aisles, their faces as bright to each other as in daylight.  But before they even came in sight of the tree they heard music.

“Thrum, thrum, thrum, thrummmm, thrummmmmmmmmmmm.”  Very soft, very insistent, very simple and strangely thrilling.  When they came to the tree, there were the Forest Children, who had come early, whirling around in a circle, and the Tree Girl in the center of the circle making music with a tiny instrument she held in one hand and touched with the fingers of the other.

Soon Forest People began arriving from every direction.  There were the Blue Water Children, bright pebbles around their necks, and white sea shells in their blue hair.  The Forest Children were crowned with maidenhair fern.  The Tree Girl was the most beautiful of all in her silver cobweb frock and her cloudy hair.  The Tree Man stood still in the shadow, but his long white beard gleamed out, and his deep eyes.  Wild Thyme wore a rope of the flower that is named for her around her neck, but there was a new rent in her purple frock and her legs were scratched as though she had remembered her dance only the last minute and come plunging the shortest way through bushes, which was true.

Thrum, thrum, thrum, thrummmmmmmmmm.

Every one except the Tree Man was dancing, bewitched in the moonlight, all over the grassy space around the great tree.  The grass was cool and refreshing under Eric’s bare feet, and he often dug his bare toes into the soft earth at its roots as he leapt or ran just to make sure he was on earth at all.  For he felt as though he were swimming in moonlight, or at least treading it.

Thrum, thrum, thrum, thrummmmmmmmmm.

When the Tree Girl’s music stopped between dances, then it would go on in Eric’s head.  It was just the sound of the night after all.  Once Eric noticed that the Beautiful Wicked Witch was dancing next to him in the circle but he was not afraid of her there with the others, and in bright moonlight.  And she was plotting no ill.  Her face was sparkling with delight and she had utterly forgotten herself in the dance.