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. After a time she disappeared again. Bennington stood still, waiting for some new prank, but he waited in vain. He instituted a search, but the search was fruitless. He called, but received no reply. At last he made his way again to the dell in which they had lunched, and there he found her, flat on her back, looking at the little summer clouds through wide-open eyes.