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be so she couldn’t explain. They couldn’t go back that way again. Her brother, she said, wouldn’t believe this; but it was so.
    Night had come, and the woman again offered the girl the bowl of sweet milk. She took it now, with a kind of reverent fear, and as carefully as though it were mass-wine, she drank some. She gave the bowl back to the woman, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, her face frightened yet resolute, as though she had drunk poison on purpose. The woman put her to sleep on the bed with her brother, and curled up herself on the floor. In the night she heard the boy more than once awake and cry; but the girl cried no more. Years later the woman would look back and try to remember if the girl had ever cried again; and did not remember that she ever had.
    In the morning the priest came. He questioned the children closely. The boy hid himself behind his sister and was silent, but the girl, less tongue-tied now, told in her strange accents what she had told the woman the previous evening, shyly insisting this was the truth, though the priest tried subtly to trap her into an admission that they were of the devil, either minor demons themselves or figments created by the devil to lead mortals into error. They had no fear of his cross or of the saints’ relics he had brought in aglass vial; yet the girl could not answer any questions he put to her about their Savior, the church, heaven or hell. At last the priest slapped his knees and rose, saying that he couldn’t tell who or what they might be, but they must at least be baptized. And so they were.
    The boy remained inconsolable. He would not eat any food but beans, which he gorged on ravenously, without seeming to gain nourishment from them; he spoke only to his sister, in words no one else understood. He wasted rapidly. His sister would let no one else nurse him, not the woman, especially not the fairy doctor, though it was clear the boy declined; soon he even ceased to weep. In the middle of one night, the girl woke the woman and, dry-eyed, told her that her brother was dead. After some thought and prayer, the priest determined that he might be buried on consecrated ground.
    The girl continued to live with the woman, who was childless and a widow. She came to eat human food without difficulty, and in time lost most of her green color, though her eyes remained large and strangely golden, like a cat’s, and she never grew to proper size, but remained always tiny, thin, and somewhat insubstantial. She helped the woman about the house; she herded the village sheep, she heard Mass on Sundays and holy days, she went to processions and festivals in the village. The priest, still alert for devilish signs, heard stories that she was wanton and had no modesty and that any boy who asked her in the right way might have her under the hedge; but she was perhaps not the only one in the village of whom that might be said.
    The woman, grateful that she had stayed and had not sickened like her brother, ceased asking her about her far country and what went on there; but many others wanted to hear her story, andcame from some distance away to question her. She received them all, sitting in the chimney corner in her best dress, and rehearsed the tale for them; and over time it grew a little longer. She said that the name of her country was St. Martin’s Land, because St. Martin was its patron. The green people there were Christian, she said, and worshiped our Savior, but on Saturdays like the Jews. She said that at the border of her country was a wide river, and beyond that river was a bright country where she had always longed to travel but could never reach. When she talked of this bright land, her pale eyes sometimes grew tears. The woman, old now, hearing her tell these things, and remembering how before the priest she had been ignorant of religion, wondered if these stories were not substitutes for true memories of her far dark country, which she had lost over