He did not follow her movement or her words, but pursued his own "--remembering that I called her that, anyway," he said. If it had been her purpose to dismiss the subject, at least she earned herself his full attention by the swiftness with which she turned upon him and by the swiftness of her reply. "It is thee I remember," she answered him. "Not her--or any such. Thou wast my friend when we played boy and girl together. All thou hast done with me, all thou hast told me, point me the way to thee as remembered marks along the road point to a camping-place--no more, and of themselves nothing." She had his attention; but he attributed the quickness of her speech and her odd thought and simile only to the general oddness of her ways. "Well, you needn't go back to those days in future," he told her. "We're friends now just as much as then." She shook her head and smiled. "Nay, after this day I must needs go farther back," she said, her voice smooth again. "Thou dost not understand--playmate days I seek. I lie in my bed on the fine nights with the van door wide, and watch the stars and play I walk among them--from star to star and round about among the stars, high to the van's roof and low to where the trees and hills stretch up to them: thou with me as when first I knew thee--in that wise I seek thee; not thus"--she broke off and changed the note of her voice. "What talk is this?" she smiled. "Childish fancies--they are not for thee," and she moved away and he followed her up the Down. "Ima, they're pretty fancies, though," he said. "And, you know, you'll lose them all if you aren't careful--if you go making yourself stiff and proper with those extraordinary lessons of yours. What are they for, those lessons? They'll spoil you, Ima. They'll make you quite different. All that kind of thing is for--for the others--for what you'd call fine ladies." "Even so," she said; and pronounced the words as if--though to his mind they explained nothing--everything was explained by them; and said no more until the crest of Plowman's Ridge was reached. II He was willing enough for his own part to relapse into his own thoughts. He went so deeply into them that, coming to the Ridge and involuntarily pausing there, he was twice told by her "Here I return," before he was aroused to her again. Bemused, he stared at her a moment as one stares that is aroused from sleep, and his mind jumped back in confusion to the last words that had passed between them. "Well, if you were so anxious for the lessons, why did you give them up when the winter was over?" She answered him--sadness in her voice rather than reproach--"We have done that talk long since. Thou dost not heed me. It is that I am going that I am telling thee." He knew he had been careless of her again, and sought to laugh it off. "Well, it is why you stopped your lessons that I am asking thee," he mimicked her. "Woman's reasons, Ima?"