He told them something of his history as they sat at table. How he'd left England with his brother when he was so little that he couldn't remember. How he'd lived on a cattle ranch and knew how to ride anything. He tried to make them understand the freedom and the solitariness of his life in those wide stretches, where there weren't any street lamps but only stars, and where one gazed on green-gray grass for miles and never saw a single house. And he told them of the places he had been to--the queerly natural ghost corners of the earth, Alaska, Mexico and the South Sea Islands. Every now and then his imagination would gallop away with him. Then he'd twist his head and stoop forward, as if listening for the first expression of doubt. Before it came, he would try to forestall it by saying, “You know, that last part's not really.” When he had said it several times Kay laughed softly. The boy looked up, a little offended. “What is it?” Her eyes were dancing with happiness. “You're--you're a very pretence person, aren't you? Peter and I, we're pretence persons. We're always going to one place and telling ourselves we're going somewhere else.” The boy sank his head between his hands. His words came timidly. “It makes one happy to pretend, especially when one's always been lonely. It's like climbing a tall tree--it belongs to anyone up there.” He turned slowly, staring at his guests. They wondered what was in his mind. At last he said, “I wish--I wish you'd call me Harry. And please don't tell me where you come from. Let's be pretence persons---- I'd like to be your friend.” With the quaint solemnity of childhood, they clasped hands. Outside the bees played their banjo-music, the flowers whispered, laying their faces close together, and the stream ran singing past the cottage, with all the words of its song remembered. CHAPTER XXVI--THE HAUNTED WOOD Life at its beginning and its end is bounded by a haunted wood. When no one is watching, children creep back to it to play with the fairies and to listen to the angels' footsteps. As the road of their journey lengthens, they return more rarely. Remembering less and less, they build themselves cities of imperative endeavor. But at night the wood comes marching to their walls, tall trees moving silently as clouds and little trees treading softly. The green host halts and calls--in the voice of memory, poetry, religion, legend or, as the Greeks put it, in the faint pipes and stampeding feet of Pan. We have all heard it. Out of fear of ridicule we do not talk about it. Do we revisit the wood, it is when sleep, or the dream of death, has claimed us and made us again children.