"Then, Marget."
"Well?"
"I think I'd best be up ere sunrise, and roll stones before all the holes, and I know five wherein ground-hogs live."
Margaret Brent laughed. "That's just what Giles did once when he was little."
"Wath Couthin Giles ever little—really little—like me?"
"Yes, Cecil, little like you; and he and I were wont to chase butterflies through the English meadows, and it's small thought either he or I ever had that we should end our lives here in the wilderness."
"End your lives!"
To Cecil it was as impossible to conceive of an end as of a beginning to these grown-up people who always had been, and, of course, always would be, the backbone of his world. After a pause given to meditation he resumed,—
"What makes folks die?"