This was all so personal and poignant that Hugh would have had to turn away and not go on watching if it were not that Ariel’s dear face remained impassive. It might have been carved from still jade, white and luminous, but impassive. Or, no,—it was like the face of a flower whose expression a self-enwrapped mortal cannot read. Hugh was grateful with his whole heart that Ariel’s face was only a flower floating on the stream of the dance.
The music poured on. Crystal. Exalted. Pure. And fiery.
But the eyes in the white jade face were waking, were getting to be seeing eyes. The pale mouth trembled. Light trembled at its sharp uptilted corners....
Hugh was frightened. “You mustn’t. Oh, Ariel!” his heart cried, loud enough for hers to hear, he should think, “Don’t let it through into your face. _Don’t let them see your soul!_”
Two children’s heads, one topping the other, peering from a fold in the hall portières, were what had brought the expression into the dancer’s face. Persis and Nicky were being naughty. Escaped from Alice’s care—or perhaps Alice was there too in another fold of the silk hangings—in their nightgowns, just as they had left their beds, they were watching Ariel dance in their mother’s very drawing-room, as they had so often watched her dancing in Wild Acres woods.
Ariel did not look at the children again. She would not give them away. But that glimpse of them had changed everything. Persis and Nicky had counted on her finding the beginning of the magic path in the woods for them, the path which would lead to faërie. It was to begin with a clump of yellow and white violets. A hidden way. A secret way. The secret of the yellow and the pearly little flower faces. But she had not found it yet. Might she find it now? Bless them! She would try.
She knelt in the center of the gray rug, and looked for a clump of white and yellow violets. She pushed the damp, dead leaves of last summer’s woods away with firm but not repudiating fingers. And there, behind the sheen of the flower-faces she had uncovered, she did discover the secret, hidden way to faërie.
Rising, she turned to take the children’s hands. The path was here, and they would walk it now together. The three walked out the path through light and shade, their faces set toward faërie.