made it look delicate, and I could not
help thinking--" I hesitated, because it seemed almost unkind to finish.

"You thought that if she had just lost one child she ought to take more
care of the other," he ended for me. There was a deep thoughtfulness in
his look, as if he were watching me. I wondered why.

"I wish I had paid more attention to the little creature," he said, very
gently. "Did it cry?"

"No," I answered. "It only clung to her and patted her black sleeve and
kissed it, as if it wanted to comfort her. I kept expecting it to cry,
but it didn't. It made me cry because it seemed so sure that it could
comfort her if she would only remember that it was alive and loved her.
I wish, I wish death did not make people feel as if it filled all the
world--as if, when it happens, there is no life left anywhere. The child
who was alive by her side did not seem a living thing to her. It didn't
matter."

I had never said as much to any one before, but his watching eyes made
me forget my shy worldlessness.

"What do you feel about it--death?" he asked.

The low gentleness of his voice seemed something I had known always.

"I never saw it," I answered. "I have never even seen any one
dangerously ill. I--It is as if I can't believe it."

"You can't believe it? That is a wonderful thing," he said, even more
quietly than before.

"If none of us believed, how wonderful that would be! Beautiful, too."

"How that poor mother believed it!" I said, remembering her swollen,
distorted, sobbing face. "She believed nothing else; everything else was
gone."

"I wonder what would have happened if you had spoken to her about the
child?" he said, slowly, as if he were trying to imagine it.

"I'm a very shy person. I should never have courage to speak to a
stranger," I answered.

"I'm afraid I'm a coward, too. She might have thought me interfering."

"She might not have understood," he murmured.

"It was clinging to her dress when she walked away down the platform," I
went on. "I dare say you noticed it then?"

"Not as you did. I wish I had noticed it more," was his answer. "Poor
little White One!"

That led us into our talk about the White People. He said he did not
think he was exactly an observant person in some respects. Remembering
his books, which seemed to me the work of a man who saw and understood
everything in the world, I could not comprehend his thinking that, and
I told him so. But he replied that what I h