She was a terribly sentimental child by fits and starts, falling into sentiment and falling out of it again with the facility of a newly dislocated limb from its socket.
Next moment I was chasing her down the corridor, both of us making the corridor echoes ring with our laughter. At the end, just by the glass door leading to the garden, down she plumped in a corner and put her little pinafore over her head.
I believe she wanted, or expected, me to pull the pinafore away and kiss her, but I didn't. I just pulled her up by the arm, and we both bundled out into the garden, and in a moment she had forgotten kissing amidst the flowers, plucking the asters and the Michaelmas daisies, and chasing the butterflies that were still plentiful in the late summer of that year.
We passed the fountains, and stopped to admire the running man. His face, worn away by time and weather, still had a ferocious expression. One wondered what he was chasing with the spear that seemed for ever on the point of leaving his hand.
"Toto," said Eloise, "yesterday when we took the drum with us, we forgot to bring little Carl's sticks: we left them by the pond."
"So we did," said I.
"Let's go and fetch them," said Eloise.
"Come on," I replied.
We took the forest path leading to the lake.
It was like plunging into a well of twilight.