At Fairfax's "Hello _you_ all!" they turned, and the big cousin never forgot it as long as he lived--never forgot the Bella that turned, that called out in what the French call "a torn voice"--_une voix dechiree_. Afterwards it struck him that she called him "Antony" _tout court_, like a grown person as she rushed to him. He never forgot how the little thing flung herself at him, threw herself against his breast. For an answer to her appeal with a quick comprehension of grief, Antony bent and took her hand. "Cousin Antony, Cousin Antony----" "Why, Bella, Bella, little cousin, what's the matter?" And above the sobs that he felt tremble through him, he asked of Gardiner--who, young as he was, stifled his tears back and gulped his own grief like a man-- "What's the row, old chap?" But Bella told him passionately. "Jetty, _Jetty's dead_!" Soothed by her cousin's hand on her head, she calmed, buried her face in the cool handkerchief with which he wiped her tears. In the circle of his arms Bella stood, tearful, sobbing, nothing but a child, and yet she appealed to Fairfax in her tears as she had not done before, and her abandon went to the core of his being and smote a bell which from thenceforth rang like her name--"Bella"--and he used to think that it was from that moment.... Well, her tears at any rate stirred him as never did any tears in the world. She wiped her eyes. "Jetty died last night; he sang himself to death. You should have heard him sing! This morning when they came to give him water and feed him, Jetty was dead." Gardiner pointed to the table. "See, we've made him a coffin. We're going to his funewal now." A discarded cigar box lined with cotton was the only coffin the children had found for the wild wood creature whose life had gone out in song. "We don't know where to buwy him, Cousin Antony." "I tried," Bella murmured, touching the blackbird's breast with gentle fingers, "I tried to write him a poem, an epitaph; but I cried so I couldn't." She held Antony's handkerchief to her tear-stained cheek. "May I keep your handkerchief for just this afternoon? It smells so delicious. You could make a cast of him, couldn't you?--like the death-mask of great men in father's books?" Fairfax dissuaded them from the funeral, at which Gardiner was to say, "Now I lay me," and Fairfax had been elected to read the Lord's Prayer. He rolled the bird up in another handkerchief (he appeared to be rich in them) and put it reverently in his overcoat pocket, promising faithfully to see that Jetty should be buried in Miss Whitcomb's back yard, under the snow, and, moreover, to mark the place with a stick, so that the children could find it when spring came. Then Bella, tear-stained but resigned, suggested that they should play "going to Siberia." "I _can't_ work to-day, Cousin Antony! Don't make me. It would seem like sewing on Sunday."