“I like her—­yes;” said Bel, slowly.  “I know she’s smart.  I mean to like her.  I do it on purpose.  But I don’t love her, with a can’t help it, you see.  I feel as if I ought to; I want to have my heart go out to her; but it keeps coming back again.  I could be happy with you, Aunt Blin, in your up-stairs room, with the blue milk out in the window-sill.  There’d be room, enough for us, but this whole farm isn’t comfortable for Ma and me!”

After that, Miss Blin only said that she would speak to Kellup; meaning her brother, Caleb Bree.

Caleb Bree was just the sort of man that by divine compensation generally marries, or gets married by a woman that is “right-up-and-a-comin’.”  He “had no objections,” to this plan of Bel’s, I mean; perhaps his favorite phrase would have expressed his strongest feeling in the crisis just referred to, also; it was a normal state of mind with him; he had gone through the world, thus far, on the principle of not “having objections.”  He had none now, “if Ma’am hadn’t, and Blin saw best.”  He let his child go out from his house down into the great, unknown, struggling, hustling, devouring city, without much thought or inquiry.  It settled that point in his family.  “Bel had gone down to Boston to be a dress-maker, ’long of her Aunt Blindy,” was what he had to say to his neighbors.  It sounded natural and satisfactory.  House-holds break up after the children are grown, of course; they all settle to something; that is all it comes to—­the child-life out of which if they had died and gone away, there would have been wailing and heart-breaking; the loving and tending and watching through cunning ways and helpless prettiness and small knowledge-getting:  they turn into men and women, and they go out into the towns, or they get married, even—­and nobody thinks, then, that the little children are dead!  But they are:  they are dead, out of the household, and they never come back to it any more.

Caleb Bree let Bel go, never once thinking that after this she never could come back the same.

Mrs. Bree had her own two children,—­and there might be more—­that would claim all that could be done for them.  She would miss Bel’s telling them stories, and washing their faces, and carrying them off into the barn or the orchard, and leaving the house quiet of a Sunday or a busy baking-day.  It had been “all Bel was good for;” and it had been more than Mrs. Bree had appreciated at the time.  Bel cried when she kissed them and bade them good-by; but she was gone; she and her round leather trunk and her little bird in its cage that she could not leave behind, though Aunt Blin did say that “she wouldn’t altogether answer for it with Bartholomew.”

Bel herself,—­the other little bird,—­who had never tried her wings, or been shut up in strange places with fierce, prowling creatures,—­she could answer for her, she thought!