ink were nearly as great as himself. The household
was not constructed or run on a hospitable basis and nothing was in tune
for entertaining. Sympathetic Bella, thrilling with liveliest interest,
assisted at the preparations, and to her bright cheeks and eyes her
mother bewailed--

"Only _twenty_ glasses, Bella, of the fine engraved deer and pheasant
pattern, and we shall be twenty-four."

"Mother, give me one in a paper and I'll take it down town and match
it."

Her mother laughed. "Match it, why they were made by hand years ago, and
are worth ten dollars apiece."

"Oh, dear," breathed the little girl, and multiplied: "Two hundred
dollars for twenty. _Mother!_"

The child stole silently out from the glistening array. Ten dollars
apiece. And she and Gardiner at their last nursery tea-party.... Through
the door, as she slipped away, she looked back at her mother, standing
thoughtful over the rows of crystal. In the great mahogany cage which,
like a small dark chateau, surmounted the pedestal of carved wood, the
blackbird Jetty huddled on his perch. He was a superb specimen, black as
jet, whence his name, a free woodland spirit, with a yellow bill like a
crocus flower, and piercing eyes. Bella passed under the cage and
called up to him, "Sing, Jetty, sing."

Piped a blackbird from a beechwood spray,
"Little maid, slow wandering this way,
What's your name?" said he.

Little Bell had wandered through the glade,
She looked up between the beechwood's shade,
"Little Bell," said she....

The child crooned to the bird her schoolroom poem. In return, Jetty sang
a short, brilliant little roulade, his one trained tune, which Bella had
vainly tried to pick out on the piano. She never heard half so sweet a
song from any bird.

"Jetty is my _favourite_ singer," she had said to Antony. But as she
lingered now under his cage in order to lengthen out the time, which,
because of her aching conscience, was hanging heavy, Jetty blinked down
at her as she stood with her hands behind her back, her face uplifted;
he peered at her like a weird familiar spirit. "Listen, Jetty. Gardiner
and I took those perfectly beautiful, expensive glasses for our tea
party. He smashed all three of them. There was a glass for Gardiner, a
glass for me and one for the uninvited guest--no, I mean the unexpected
guest. Gardiner sat down on the glasses where I had put them out to wash
them. He would have been awfully