"Thanks." The boy's mouth trembled a little, and he worked his thumb
into the soft earth. "He was one of the very best, and it was not
right. He was too young and too much missed. I don't understand it.
He had twenty-five years to his credit, and I wanted to show him
what I was going to do. It's all a puzzle to me. There's something
frightfully wrong about it all, and it's been worrying me awfully."

Joan couldn't find anything to say. Years before, when she was four
years old, Death had come to her house and taken her own father
away, and she had a dim remembrance of dark rooms and of her mother
crying as though she had been very badly hurt. It was a vague figure
now, and the boy's queer way of talking about it so personally made
the conventional expressions that she had heard seem out of place.
It was the little shake in his voice that touched her.

"He had just bought a couple of new hunters and was going to run the
hunt this fall. I wanted him to live forever. He died in New York,
and I came here to try and get used to being without him. I thought
I should stay all alone for the rest of my life, but--this morning
when I was moping about, everything looked so young and busy that I
got a sort of longing to be young and busy again myself. I don't
know how to explain it, but everything shouted at me to get up and
shake myself together, and on the almanac in Father's room I read a
thing that seemed to be a sort of message from him."

"Did you? What was it?"

"'We count it death to falter, not to die.' It was under to-day's
date, and it was the first thing I saw when I went to the desk where
Father used to sit, and it was his voice that read it to me. It was