"Don't you do that no more!" said the woman. "It don't hurt to be
dead. Honest, it don't! It feels real good to be that way."

"I--I--I don't think I'd like--to be dead!"

"You don't have to if you don't want to," the woman replied, thrown
into a confusion of pain and alarm. To comfort him, to shield him from
agony, to keep the shadow of fear from falling upon him: she desired
nothing more; and she was content to succeed if but for the moment. "I
tell you," she continued, "you never will be dead--if you don't want
to. Your father wanted to be dead. 'I think, Millie,' says he, 'I'd
like to be dead.' 'All right, Dick,' says I. 'If you want to, I won't
stand in your way. But I don't know about the boy.' 'Oh,' says he,
'the boy won't stand in my way.' 'I guess that's right, Dick,' says I,
'for the boy loves you.' And so," she concluded, "he died. But _you_
don't have to die. You'll never die--not unless you want to." She
kissed him. "Don't you be afraid, dear!" she crooned.

"I'm not--afraid."

"Well, then," she asked, puzzled, "what _are_ you?"

"I don't know," he faltered. "I think it makes me--sick at
the--stomach."

He had turned white. She took him in her arms, to comfort and hearten
him--an unfailing device: her kisses, her warm, ample bosom, her close
embrace; he was by these always consoled....

Next day, then, in accordance with the woman's device, the boy and his
mother set out with the veiled man for the Church of the Lifted Cross,
where the obsequies of Senator Boligand were to take place. It was sad
weather--a cold rain falling, the city gray, all the world black-clad
and dripping and sour of countenance. The veiled man said never a
word; he held the boy's hand tight, and strode gloomily on--silent of
melancholy, of protest, of ill temper: there was no knowing, for his
face was hid. The woman, distinguished by a mass of blinding blonde
hair and a complexion susceptible to change by the weather, was dressed
in the ultra-fashionable way--the small differences of style all
accentuated: the whole tawdry and shabby and limp in the rain. The
child, a slender boy, delicately white of skin, curly headed, with
round, dark eyes, outlooking in wonder and troubled regard, but yet
bravely enough, trotted between the woman and the man, a hand in the
hand of each.... And when they came to the Church of the Lifted Cross;
and when the tiny, flickering lights, and the stained windows, and the
sh