She walked more and more slowly, letting herself down cautiously from one ledge to another, and presently stopped altogether, facing a beech tree, its trunk slowly twisted into a spiral because it was so hard to keep alive on those rocks.  She was straight in front of it, staring into its gray white-blotched bark.  Now if Mother asked her, of course she’d have to say, yes, she had planned to, sort of but not quite.  Mother would understand.  There wasn’t any use trying to tell things how they really were to Paul, because to him things weren’t ever sort-of-but-not-quite.  They either were or they weren’t.  But Mother always knew, both ways, hers and Paul’s.

She stepped forward and downward now, lightened.  Her legs stretched out to carry her from one mossed rock to another.  “Striding,” that was what she was doing.  Now she knew just what “striding” meant.  What fun it was to feel what a word meant!  Then when you used it, you could feel it lie down flat in the sentence, and fit into the other words, like a piece in a jig-saw puzzle when you got it into the right place.  Gracious!  How fast you could “stride” down those rocks into Aunt Hetty’s back yard!

Hello!  Here at the bottom was some snow, a great big drift of it still left, all gray and shrunk and honey-combed with rain and wind, with a little trickle of water running away softly and quietly from underneath it, like a secret.  Well, think of there being still snow left anywhere except on top of the mountains!  She had just been thinking all the afternoon how good it seemed to have the snow all gone, and here she ran right into some, as if you’d been talking about a person, saying how sick and tired you were of everlastingly seeing him around, and there he was, right outside the window and hearing it all, and knowing it wasn’t his fault he was still hanging on.  You’d feel bad to know he’d heard.  She felt bad now!  After all, the fun the snow had given them, all that winter, sleighing and snow-shoeing and ski-running and sliding downhill.  And when she remembered how glad she’d been to see the first snow, how she and little Mark had run to the window to see the first flakes, and had hollered, Oh goody, goody! And here was all there was left, just one poor old forgotten dirty drift, melting away as fast as it could, so’s to get itself out of the way.  She stood looking down on it compassionately, and presently, stooping over, gave it a friendly, comforting pat with one mittened hand.

Then she was pierced with an arrow of hunger, terrible, devouring starvation!  Why was it she was always so much hungrier just as she got out of school, than ever at meal-times?  She did hope this wouldn’t be one of those awful days when Aunt Hetty’s old Agnes had let the cookie-jar get empty!