,
and her grandmother taught her a great deal more. Her grandmother told
her stories still, and, though she was nearly eighteen and felt that
she was getting so dreadfully old, she still liked stories. Then she
had a good many friends, and she spent much of her time with them. She
visited Ellen often, too, going to see her at times when she thought
that Terence would not be at home. Ellen and Peter still lived on the
east side of the Park, and some of her friends lived there, too, so
that Kathleen often walked through the north end of the Park, near
that hill that I have told you about so many times before.

Kathleen was fond of this part of the Park, as everybody is who knows
it. But especially she was fond of one little spot that nobody else
seemed to notice much. So Kathleen got a feeling that this one place
belonged to her, and she was all the more fond of it because of that.
It was a tiny little basin of water, near the path, but up a grassy
bank. On the side toward the path it was all open, but on the other
side there were rocks, and out of a little cleft in the rocks ran a
bit of a stream of water that fed the little basin. Then, around the
rocks and over them there was more grass, and the hill rose at both
sides and above. On the edge of the hill, right over the basin, was a
pine-tree, and around it were other trees. Their branches came
together over the water and almost shut out the sky from it, but not
quite.

Every time that Kathleen passed it, she went up the bank and looked
into the still water. She had a feeling that if she ever went by and
did not do this the water would miss her and would feel hurt. When she
did this by daylight and in summer, if she stood up and looked into
the water, she could see a patch of branches and green leaves and blue
sky through them, about as big as the basin itself, and that was
scarcely larger than a fair-sized tub. But if she stooped down close
to the water and looked into it, she saw that there was a great deal
of sky under it, below the trees, which grew upside down. There was
almost as much sky under the water as she could see above it, and she
believed that there would prove to be quite as much if she could only
get her head where she could see it.

She used to look in at night sometimes, too, and try to see if there
were any stars in that sky; but in the summer she never could see any,
because the leaves on the trees were so thick that they almost hid the
sky, and