She, at any rate, was not a stranger to this moorland.  Indeed, something in her carriage, in the grey cloak she wore, in her light, insistent step, in the old lantern she carried, in the shrill little song she or the wind seemed singing, for a moment half impelled me to turn aside.  Even Rosinante pricked forward her ears, and stooped her gentle face to view more closely this light traveller.  And she pawed the ground with her great shoe, and gnawed her bit when I drew rein and leaned forward in the saddle to speak to the child.

“Is there any path here, little girl, that I may follow?” I said.

“No path at all,” she answered.

“But how then do strangers find their way across the moor?” I said.

She debated with herself a moment.  “Some by the stars, and some by the moon,” she answered.

“By the moon!” I cried.  “But at day, what then?”

“Oh, then, sir,” she said, “they can see.”

I could not help laughing at her demure little answers.  “Why!” I exclaimed, “what a worldly little woman!  And what is your name?”

“They call me Lucy Gray,” she said, looking up into my face.  I think my heart almost ceased to beat.

“Lucy Gray!” I repeated.

“Yes,” she said most seriously, as if to herself, “in all this snow.”

“‘Snow,’” I said—­“this is dewdrops shining, not snow.”

She looked at me without flinching.  “How else can mother see how I am lost?” she said.

“Why!” said I, “how else?” not knowing how to reach her bright belief.  “And what are those thick woods called over there?”

She shook her head.  “There is no name,” she said.

“But you have a name—­Lucy Gray; and you started out—­do you remember?—­one winter’s day at dusk, and wandered on and on, on and on, the snow falling in the dark, till—­Do you remember?”

She stood quite still, her small, serious face full to the east, striving with far-off dreams.  And a merry little smile passed over her lips.  “That will be a long time since,” she said, “and I must be off home.”  And as if it had been but an apparition of my eyes that had beset and deluded me, she was gone; and I found myself sitting astride in the full brightness of the sun’s first beams, alone.

What omen was this, then, that I should meet first a phantom on my journey?  One thing only was clear:  Rosinante could trust to her five wits better than I to mine.  So leaving her to take what way she pleased, I rode on, till at length we approached the woods I had descried.  Presently we were jogging gently down into a deep and misty valley flanked by bracken and pines, from which issued into the crisp air of morning a most delicious aromatic smell, that seemed at least to prove this valley not far remote from Araby.