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run into the pit’s mouth; the girl caught him, and held him back, and spoke words to him the woman couldn’t understand. The boy shook his head and shouted, as though not believing what the girl told him; she pulled him again roughly away from the pit’s entrance, and spoke sharply to him. The boy began to weep then, a storm of tears, and his sister—it seemed to the woman they must be brother and sister—held him tightly as though to smother his tears, all the while looking with her large pale eyes at the woman, for help, or from fear, or both.
    Pity overcame the woman’s wonder, and she came to them, telling them not to be afraid, asking if they were lost.
    “Yes,” the girl said, and her speech, though in form different from common human speech, was intelligible. “Yes. Lost.”
    The woman took them to her own house. The boy, still weeping, refused to enter it, but with her rough yet protective manner his sister drew him in. The darkness within seemed to calm them both, though the boy still whimpered. The woman offered them food, good bread, a bowl of milk, but they refused them with revulsion. The woman decided to get help and advice. Making gestures and speaking softly, she told them to stay, rest, she would be back soon; she put the food nearby in case they should want it, and hurried out to call her neighbors and the priest, wondering if when she returned the green children would not have disappeared, or her belongings, or the house itself.
    She brought back with her a weaver known to be a fairy doctor, who could cure the stroke, and his wife, and several others whom she met, though not the priest, who was asleep; and they allwent to see the green children, the village dogs barking behind them.
    They were as she had left them, sitting on the bed, their arms around each other and their bare green feet hanging down. The fairy doctor lit a bit of blessed candle he had brought, but they didn’t start at it; they only looked with silent trepidation, like shy wild things, at the faces peering in the door and window at them. In the darkness of the house they seemed to glow faintly, like honey.
    “They won’t eat,” the woman said. “Give them beans,” the fairy doctor said. “Beans are the fairy food.”
    They were fairies to this extent, at least; when the woman gave them beans, they devoured them hungrily, though they still refused all other food.
    They would answer no questions about the place they had come from, or how they had come to the Wolf-pits; when asked if they could return to where they came from, they only wept, the boy loudly, the girl almost grudgingly, her face set and her fists clenched and the tears trembling on the lashes of her luminous eyes. But later, at twilight, when the people had all gone away, and the boy had fallen asleep exhausted by grief, the woman by kindly questions did learn their story, holding the girl’s cool green hand in hers.
    They came from a land below the earth, she said. There it is always twilight, “like this,” she said, gesturing to include the dimness of the house, the crepuscular fast-darkening blue of the doorway and the window, perhaps also the birds sleepily speaking and the hush of evening wind in the leaves outside. It was cool there; the rushing cool breath the villagers had noticed coming even in high summer from the Wolf-pits was the exhalation of her country. Everyone there was the same hue as herself; she had been asmuch frightened, she said, by the woman’s odd color as by the unbearable brilliance of the sun.
    She and her brother were shepherd’s children, and had gone in search of a lost lamb. They had got lost themselves, and after a long fearful time had heard, far off, a bell ringing. They had followed the sound of the bell, and had found the exit of the pit.
    Would they go home again? the woman asked. No, they could not. Whatever is an exit from that country, the girl said, is not an entrance; she was sure of that, though why this should