So he only trembled and hugged his little girl to him tightly, and mother would not let the child play on the dam again all that summer.
She made songs to fit the rhythmic murmur of the wheels.

And always she remembered the days she had spent with Daddy Mason in the factory where the machines thumped and creaked, and where the long rubber sheets were cut and sewed, and the clanking rolls of tin and zinc curled into strips, and Daddy Mason made her a little set of dishes and all the things she needed in her playhouse from the scraps of tin and rubber, and she learned to twist the little tin strips on a stick and make the prettiest bright shiny tin curls for her dolls that a little girl ever saw in all the world.

And once Ellen came from among the moving shadows of the wheels and drew Jeanette from beneath a great knife that fell at her feet, and when Daddy Mason saw what had happened he fainted, poor man, and made her promise never, never, so long as she lived, to tell Grandma Mason.

And then he drove her up town, and they had some ice-cream, and she was sent to bed without her lunch because she would not tell Grandma Mason why grandpa bought ice-cream for her.
It was such a beautiful life, so natural and so exactly what a little girl should have, that even though she went to the ocean and crossed it as a child with her mother and grandmother, and even though she went to the mountains many times, her childish heart always was homesick for the mill, and at night in her dreams her ears were filled with the murmur of waters and the wordless song of ceaseless wheels.
And once when she came back a big girl,--an exceedingly big girl with braids down her back, a girl in the third reader in fact, who could read everything in the fourth reader, because she had already done so, and who could read Eugene Aram in the back of the sixth, only she never did find out what "gyves upon his wrists" meant,--once when she came back to the dam and was sitting there looking at the sunset reflected in the bubbling, froth-flecked water at her feet, Ellen came suddenly, under the noise of the roaring water, and frightened Jeanette so that she screamed and jumped; and Ellen, who was much older than Jeanette--four or five and maybe six years older--ran right over the slippery, moss-covered ridge of the dam, and was gone before Jeanette could call her back.

The child never saw her playmate again, though often Jeanette would wonder where Ellen lived and who she was.