Seemed to me she had just about everything--a gold locket and chain,
bronze boots, and paper dolls by the dozen. We used to play together,
day in day out, one of those plays that last all the time, where you
pretend you're some one else and act it out in all you do. We kept it up
for years. I don't see that we've changed much with growing up. Seems to
me we were pretty near the same then as we are now, having our spats,
but having lots of fun, and wanting to share everything. Estelle lived
in East Boston, too, and was going to be a school-teacher. It seemed to
me that to be a school-teacher was just about the finest thing anybody
could do. That would have been my ambition, to be a school-teacher. But
I never got beyond the grammar school, I was needed at home to help
mother. Then my poor pa died--an accident down in the docks,"--Aurora,
lowering her voice, began to hurry and condense,--"then Ben, then Joe,
then--will you believe it?--Charlie, that I loved best. They all had the
same delicate constitution as ma, it turned out, and a predisposition to
the same trouble. Then finally, after going through with so much, my
poor mother went, too, and for that I could only be thankful. And I had
taken care of them all. I wasn't twenty-three when I was the last left.
Doesn't it seem strange! I sometimes can't believe it even now."

This rapid enumeration of calamities so great robbed them of terror and
pathos, yet Gerald had somewhat the startled, shocked feeling of a man
who knows he has been struck by a bullet, though his nerves have not yet
announced it by suffering.

Aurora, who after the passing of years could think of these things
without tears, yet in speaking of them to a sympathetic hearer had
obvious difficulty in keeping a stiff upper lip. Gerald turned away his
eyes while with her hand she covered and tried to stop her mouth's
trembling.

"Poor child!" he said, with a sincerity which saved the words from
insignificance.

"Yes," she half laughed. "Wouldn't one think it enough to sort of subdue
anybody, take the starch out of them for some time? When I came out of
that house of sickness I couldn't think of anything else but sickness
and death. It stuck to me like the smell of disinfectants after you've
been in a hospital. I couldn't think of anything but that it would take
me next. I supposed I must be affected, too. But the doctor examined me,
and do you know what he said? 'Sound as a trout,' he said. 'You're so