"Please, sir," she said, "we wanted to ask you something, but you were playing with the boy."
"The boy?" he said: "did you see the boy?"
They lifted their eyes to him.
"Why, of course," they answered.
For a moment he was silent. Then his voice changed a little.
"Come and sit down," he said, "and tell me what you saw."
When they had told him, he just nodded, and sat, as Mr Williams had done, staring in front of him.
"Well, now you know," he said, "why this wood is private, and why I never allow anybody to come into it."
"Because of the boy?" asked Marian.
"Because of the boy," he said. "I'll try to explain to you, but I doubt if you'll understand. You see, I had a notion that if we human beings could only imagine anything hard enough, the thing that we imagined might become actually real, if only just for a minute or two."