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.

He would lose her utterly, and would stand quite motionless, listening, for a long time.  Suddenly, without warning, an exaggerated leaf crown would fall about his neck, and he would be overwhelmed with ridicule at the outrageous figure he presented.  Then for a time she seemed everywhere at once.  The mottled sunlight under the trees danced and quivered after her, smiling and darkening as she dimpled or was grave.  The little whirlwinds of the gulches seized the leaves and danced with her too, the birches and aspens tossed their hands, and rising ever higher and wilder and more elf-like came the mocking cadences of her laughter.