After the meal he wanted to lie down in the grasses and watch the

clouds sail by, but she would have none of it. She haled him away to

the brookside. There she showed him how to wash dishes by filling them

half full of water in which fine gravel has been mixed, and then

whirling the whole rapidly until the tin is rubbed quite clean. Never

was prosaic task more delightful. They knelt side by side on the bank,

under the dense leaves, and dabbled in the water happily. The ferns

were fresh and cool. Once a redbird shot confidently down from above on

half-closed wing, caught sight of these intruders, brought up with a

swish of feathers, and eyed them gravely for some time from a

neighbouring treelet. Apparently he was satisfied with his inspection,

for after a few minutes he paid no further attention to them, but went

about his business quietly. When the dishes had been washed, Mary

stood over Bennington while he packed them in the bundle and strapped

them on the saddle.

"Now," said she at last, "we have nothing more to think of until we go

home."

She was like a child, playing with exhaustless spirits at the most

trivial games. Not for a moment would she listen to anything of a

serious nature. Bennington, with the heavier pertinacity of men when

they have struck a congenial vein, tried to repeat to some extent the

experience of the last afternoon at the rock. Mary laughed his

sentiment to ridicule and his poetics to scorn. Everything he said she

twisted into something funny or ridiculous. He wanted to sit down and

enjoy the calm peace of the little ravine in which they had pitched

their temporary camp, but she made a quiet life miserable to him. At

last in sheer desperation he arose to pursue, whereupon she vanished

lightly into the underbrush. A moment later he heard her clear laugh

mocking him from some elder thickets a hundred yards away. Bennington

pursued with ardour. It was as though a slow-turning ocean liner were

to try to run down a lively little yacht.

Bennington had always considered girls as weak creatures, incapable of

swift motion, and needing assistance whenever the country departed from

the artificial level of macadam. He had also thought himself fairly

active. He revised these ideas. This girl could travel through the thin

brush of the creek bottom two feet to his one, because she ran more

lightly and surely, and her endurance was not a matter for discussion.

The question of second wind did not concern her any more than it does a

child, whose ordinary mode of progression is heartbreaking. Bennington

found that he was engaged in the most delightful play of his life. He

shouted aloud with the fun of it. He had the feeling that he was

grasping at a sunbeam, or a mist-shape that always eluded him.




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