Eustace seemed delighted.
“That man thinks us mad!” he said.
“Are we mad?” Winifred asked, surprised at her own strange enjoyment of the adventure.
“Who knows?” said Eustace, looking at her narrowly. “You like this escapade?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“My mask!” he thought, secretly longing to be quietly by the fire sipping tea and reading Punch. “She loves that.”
They were through the trees now, across the broad path, out on the open lawns.
“Now for it!” he shouted, as the wind roared in their faces.
He paid out the coils of the thin cord. The white monster skimmed, struggled near the ground, returned, darted again upward and outward, felt for the wind’s hands, caught them and sprang, with a mad courage, star-wards, its gay ribbons flying like coloured birds to mark its course. But soon they were lost to sight, and only a diminished, ghost-like shadow leaping against the black showed where the kite beat on to liberty.
Eustace ran with the wind, and Winifred followed him. The motion sent an exultation dancing through her veins, and stirred her blood into a ferment. The noises in the trees, the galloping music of the airs on their headlong courses, rang in her ears like clashing bells. She called as she ran, but never knew what words. She leaped, as if over glorious obstacles. Her feet danced on the short grass. She had a sudden notion: “I am living now!” and Eustace had never seemed so near to her. He had an art to find why children are happy, she thought, because they do little strange things, coupling mechanical movements, obvious actions that may seem absurd, with soft flights of the imagination, that wrap their prancings and their leaps in golden robes, and give to the dull world a glory. The hoop is their demon enemy, whom they drive before them to destruction. The kite is a great white bird, whom they hold back for a time from heaven. Suddenly Winifred longed to feel the bird’s efforts to be free.