Well, there! this was better, as the ground started uphill. There was firm ground under her feet. Yes, not mud, nor soaked, flabby meadow-land, but solid earth, _solid, solid!_ She stamped on it with delight. It was just as nice to have solid things _very_ solid, as it was to have floaty things like clouds _very_ floaty. What was horrid was to have a thing that _looked_ solid, and yet was all soft, like gelatine pudding when you touched it.
Well, for goodness' sake, where was she? Where had she come to, without thinking a single thing about it? Right on the ridge overlooking Aunt Hetty's house to be sure, on those rocks that hang over it, so you could almost throw a stone down any one of the chimneys. She might just as well go down and make Aunt Hetty a visit now she was so near, and walk home by the side-road. Of course Paul would say, nothing could keep him from saying, that she had planned to do that very thing, right along, and when she left the school-house headed straight for Aunt Hetty's cookie-jar. Well, _let_ him! She could just tell him, she'd never _dreamed_ of such a thing, till she found herself on those rocks.
She walked more and more slowly, letting herself down cautiously from one ledge to another, and presently stopped altogether, facing a beech tree, its trunk slowly twisted into a spiral because it was so hard to keep alive on those rocks. She was straight in front of it, staring into its gray white-blotched bark. Now if _Mother_ asked her, of course she'd have to say, yes, she had planned to, _sort of_ but not quite. Mother would understand. There wasn't any use trying to tell things how they really were to Paul, because to him things weren't ever sort-of-but-not-quite. They either were or they weren't. But Mother always knew, both ways, hers and Paul's.
She stepped forward and downward now, lightened. Her legs stretched out to carry her from one mossed rock to another. "Striding," that was what she was doing. Now she knew just what "striding" meant. What fun it was to _feel_ what a word meant! Then when you used it, you could feel it lie down flat in the sentence, and fit into the other words, like a piece in a jig-saw puzzle when you got it into the right place. Gracious! How fast you could "stride" down those rocks into Aunt Hetty's back yard!