“Grandmother taught me.”
“‘Grandmother!’ Yes, you said grandmother before.”
“She is father’s mother. Father was drowned in a squall while out fishing when I was seven years old. That was in the spring; mother died of pleurisy the next winter; a bitter, bitter winter, when the snow lay two or three feet deep on the ground and drifted around our little house, and there was no one to bring us wood from the main but grandmother and me, and we had to go for it in the boat and couldn’t bring but a little at a time; and we had no doctor and that was the way poor mother died.”
Gloria’s bright eyes were full of tears. She slipped her hand in that of the boy and said:
“But maybe she would have died all the same. My mother had everything in the world, and she died. But you know neither of them really died; they went to heaven.”
“Yes,” said the boy, in a low tone.
“Now, ain’t grown people queer, David Lindsay?”
“How?”
“The way they talk. They will say one minute a man has died and gone to heaven, and the next minute they will say he is buried in such a church-yard. Now, how can he be in heaven and in the ground at the same time?”
“I don’t know. It is a great mystery,” said the boy, gravely.