“Tell me how it happened,” I said.

Dorothy looked at me with inscrutable eyes, and spoke in a voice without emotion.

“He caught a cold, and was very ill in bed.  I went in to see him, and he was all white and faded.  I said to him, `How are you Edward?’ and he said, `I shall get up early in the morning to catch beetles.’  I didn’t see him any more.”

“Poor little chap!” I murmured.

“I went to the funeral,” she continued monotonously, “It was very rainy, and I threw a little bunch of flowers down into the hole.  There was a whole lot of flowers there; but I think Edward liked apples better than flowers.”

“Did you cry?” I said cruelly.

She paused.  “I don’t know.  I suppose so.  It was a long time ago; I think I have forgotten.”

Even while she spoke I heard Edward puffing along the sands:  Edward who had been so fond of apples.

“I cannot stand this any longer,” I said aloud.  “Let’s get out and walk in the woods for a change.”

She agreed, with a depth of comprehension that terrified me; and the motor pulled up with a jerk at a spot where hardly a post served to mark where the woods commenced and the wayside grass stopped.  We took one of the dim paths which the rabbits had made and forced our way through the undergrowth into the peaceful twilight of the trees.

“You haven’t got very sunburnt this year,” I said as we walked.

“I don’t know why.  I’ve been out on the beach all the days.  Sometimes I’ve played, too.”

I did not ask her what games she had played, or who had been her play-friend.  Yet even there in the quiet woods I knew that Edward was holding her back from me.  It is true that, in his boy’s way, he had been fond of me; but I should not have dared to take her out without him in the days when his live lips had filled the beach with song, and his small brown body had danced among the surf.  Now it seemed that I had been disloyal to him.

And presently we came to a clearing where the leaves of forgotten years lay brown and rotten beneath our feet, and the air was full of the dryness of death.

“Let’s be going back.  What do you think, Dorothy?” I said.

“I think,” she said slowly,—­“I think that this would be a very good place to catch beetles.”

A wood is full of secret noises, and that is why, I suppose, we heard a pair of small quick feet come with a dance of triumph through the rustling bracken.  For a minute we listened deeply, and then Dorothy broke from my side with a piercing call on her lips.

“Oh, Edward, Edward!” she cried; “Edward!”

But the dead may play no more, and presently she came back to me with the tears that are the riches of childhood streaming down her face.

“I can hear him, I can hear him,” she sobbed; “but I cannot see him.  Never, never again.”

And so I led her back to the motor.  But in her tears I seemed to find a promise of peace that she had not known before.