y dear--Annabel is quite warm,"
said the soft voice; and the child returned to the play.

It was a childish game of funerals at which the children played. The hand
of Death, hovering over the dolls, had singled out Flora, the
articulations of whose sawdust body were seams and whose boots were
painted on her calves of fibrous plaster. For the greater solemnity, the
children had made themselves sweeping trains of the garments of their
elders, and those with cropped curls had draped their heads with shawls,
the fringes of which they had combed out with their fingers to simulate
hair--long hair, such as Sabrina, the eldest, had hanging so low down
her back that she could almost sit on it. A cylindrical-bodied horse,
convertible (when his flat head came out of its socket) into a
locomotive, headed the sad _cortege_; then came the defunct Flora; then
came Jack, the raffish sailor doll, with other dolls; and the children
followed with hushed whisperings.

The youngest of the children passed the high-backed walnut chair in which
the old lady sat. She stopped.

"Aunt Rachel--" she whispered, slowly and gravely opening very wide and
closing very tight her eyes.

"Yes, dear?"

"Flora's dead!"

The old lady, when she smiled, did so less with her lips than with her
faded cheeks. So sweet was her face that you could not help wondering,
when you looked on it, how many men had also looked upon it and loved it.
Somehow, you never wondered how many of them had been loved in return.

"I'm so sorry, dear," Aunt Rachel, who in reality was a great-aunt, said.
"What did she die of this time?"

"She died of ... Brown Titus ... 'n now she's going to be buried in a
grave as little as her bed."

"In a what, dear?"

"As little ... dread ... as little as my bed ... you say it, Sabrina."

"She means, Aunt Rachel,

"_Teach me to live that I may dread
The Grave as little as my bed,_"

Sabrina, the eldest, interpreted.

"Ah!... But won't you play at cheerful things, dears?"

"Yes, we will, presently, Aunt Rachel; gee up, horse!... Shall we go and
ask the chair-woman if she's warm enough?"

"Do, dears."

Again the message was taken, and this time it seemed as if Annabel, the
gipsy, was not warm enough, for she gathered up her loops of cane and
brought the chair she was mending a little way into the hall-kitchen
itself. She sat down on the square box they used to cover the sewing
machine.

"Thank you, lady dear," she murmured, li