As the quick months and years passed over our heads, the trouble that never could be cured kept gliding away, further and further back into some very far-off past, until at last it seemed to me that it was not I who had lived here with my mother, but another boy, a much smaller, graver boy--a better boy, too, perhaps--but very different from what I was now. I looked back at him half wonderingly, half regretfully, through a sort of mist of brightness and light. It must have been so easy for him to be good alone with his mother, and hearing nothing day by day but her good words. What would she have done with the big rough fellow that had grown by degrees into her little boy's place? Would he have been quiet and gentle enough for her, if she had lived? Yes, all the time I felt a sort of certainty that she would have loved me, nay, that she did love me still. And I should like to have let her know, that though of course I had got into a harder life--a life in most things far unlike what it used to be when she was with me--yet that I still often remembered and wished to obey her words, that I should try to be good without her always. But these thoughts I never spoke, even to Cuthbert. I was a child when Cuthbert came, I was a boy now, and he had helped to make me one. From the first time I saw him climb the outside of the Queen's Tower, swinging himself upwards from branch to branch of the old ivy, he became my pattern: I resolved to follow him, and if it made Granny scream to see us, why, so much the better. The Castle ruins were the best play-ground that children ever had. On half-holidays the whole school used to troop up there directly they were let out, and the old walls rang with shouts and laughter. Cuthbert and Hildred were always glad to see them, but I liked it best when we had it all to ourselves. There was a hole in the wall, through which we used to creep, a steep bit of cliff to climb down, and then the stream. Across it such woods, green, tangled, thick with brambles and underwood, full of wild strawberries, blackberry bushes, rabbits, and birds'-nests built up in the huge trees that stood knee-deep in king-fern. Wherever Cuthbert and I went, and we went everywhere, little Hildred tried to follow us. It was clearly understood that she was never to be in the way. 'Girls always were,' Cuthbert said loftily; 'but still'----It would have been hard to leave her at home because she was a girl, for she would so fain have been a boy. She might come, if she would scramble through the brambles, without caring how much she scratched her arms and legs, and tore her frock. She must be ready to cross the stream, even if the rains had swollen it, and it was sparkling away ankle-deep over the stepping-stones.