Once more, and only once, before their childhood together ended, was she to see all, feel all, suffer all with him. Toward the end of the summer Robbie sickened and died. For three nights the children sat up with him, taking turns at sleep, refusing alien help. By candle-light, in Eppie’s room, they bent over Robbie’s basket, listening to his laboring breath. The general, protesting against the folly of the sleepless nights, yet tiptoed in and out, gruffly kind, moved by the pathos of the young figures. He gave medical advice and superintended the administering of teaspoonfuls of milk and brandy. That he thought Robbie’s case a hopeless one the children knew, for all his air of reassuring good cheer. Robbie died early on the morning of the fourth day. A little while before, he faintly wagged his tail when they spoke to him, raising eyes unendurably sad. Eppie, during the illness, had been constantly in tears; Gavan had shown a stoic fortitude. But when all was over and Eppie was covering Robbie with the white towel that was to be his shroud, Gavan suddenly broke down. Casting his arms around her, hiding his face against her, he burst into sobs, saying in a shuddering voice, while he clung to her, shaken all through with the violence of his weeping: “Oh, I can’t bear it, Eppie! I can’t bear it!” Before this absolute shattering Eppie found her own self-control. Holding him to her,--and she almost thought that he would have fallen if she had not so held him,--she murmured, “Gavan, darling Gavan, I know, I know.” “Oh, Eppie,” he gasped, “we will never see him again.” She had drawn him down to the window-seat, where they leaned together, and she was silent for a moment at his last words. But suddenly her arms tightened around him with an almost vindictive tenderness. “We _will_,” she said. “Never! Never!” Gavan gasped. “His eyes, Eppie,--his eyes seemed to know it; they were saying good-by forever. And, oh, Eppie, they were so astonished--so astonished,” he repeated, while the sobs shook him. “We will,” Eppie said again, pressing the boy’s head to hers, while she shut her eyes over the poignant memory. “Why, Gavan, I don’t know much about God, but I do know about heaven. Animals will go to heaven; it wouldn’t be heaven unless they were there.” That memory of the astonishment in Robbie’s eyes seemed to put knives in her heart, but over the sharpness she grasped her conviction. In all the despair of his grief, the boy had, in answering her, the disciplined logic of his more formal faith, more clearly seen fact. “Dear Eppie, animals have no souls.” “How do you know?” she retorted, almost with anger. “One only has to think. They stop, as Robbie has.” “How do you know he has stopped? It’s only,” said Eppie, groping, “that he doesn’t want his body any longer.”