of tone, said to Jamie, softly: “Do you know how beautiful dying can be?”
Perhaps that hit Jamie the hardest of all, because he had not been contemplating Death as a beautiful thing, and he had been contemplating it day and night for other men for more years than he liked to enumerate. In his own case, two was plenty. He could not speak, so he shook his head.
“Just like me,” said the small person. “I didn’t know anything at all about it, but Nannette did. Nannette’s my big sister. She had the rottenest luck. At the lake where we went last summer, a man got drowned and next day Nannette was playing along the shore with some other kids and ran right into him just as they got him out of the water, and he had been in long a-plenty and the turtles hadn’t done a thing to him. And she came home and Mother said she had the hysterics, and she kept on havin’ ’em in the night in her sleep ’til I got so I saw about what she’d seen. So not long ago, my mother’s little old Aunt Beth went to Heaven and first Mother said we couldn’t go and say good-bye to her. She went in the night, you know, in her sleep, with her hands folded on her breast and the strangest little mysterious smile on her face. It was like she knew a beautiful secret that she’d love to tell, and she was smilin’ over it while she decided whether she would tell or not. Dad said maybe it’d be a good thing to let us go. Maybe Nannette would see something that would make her feel better. Nannette
