itherto so prompt
to obey his behests, made no move for his release. He called and called
again, beating about the cage and even breaking into a song of wild
entreaty. Shame-faced and conscience-stricken, we yet put him off,
expecting our guest minute by minute. It was nearly seven when regrets
were telephoned, but by that time Robin was in a panic and smote our
hearts by the terror with which he fluttered back from us as we bent
over the cage.

The instant the lid was raised he whirred up to the scarlet oak, where
his faithful chum still waited, but before their belated departure
Robin flew down to Dame Gentle's window and told her all about it, and
then over to Giant Bluff's piazza, where he rehearsed his grievances
again in a scolding chirp never heard from him before.

We closed the house on the fourteenth and went away, unforgiven by
Robin Hood, who has never, so far as I know, come to human hand since
Mary's clasp betrayed him to captivity. During those six days we caught
flying glimpses of our estranged fosterling, easily recognized from a
distance by the two white feathers in his tail, and a few times he
started, by sheer force of habit, to hop across the road to us from
Dame Gentle's, but, half-way over, he would turn sharply about, give an
angry little yep, and hop back again.

When we reopened the house in late September, not even Dame Gentle had
recent news of Robin Hood, and all the winter long we carried a
sorrowful sense of broken friendship. We were anxious about our
hand-reared birdling, too, hardly daring to hope that he could survive
the perils of migration. What a desperate adventure it seemed!

"Who hath talked to the shy bird-people,
And counseled the feathered breast
To follow the sagging rain-wind
Over the purple crest?"

But on the sixth day of March Robin Hood came home. There had been a
baby blizzard the night before and, as we returned from college in the
early afternoon, I noticed birdtracks in the light snow that still
mantled the piazza rail.

"See those prints, right where Robin Hood used to sit and watch us take
our supper!" I exclaimed, a wild hope knocking at my heart, but
Joy-of-Life thought it a case of hungry tree sparrows and, with her
especial tenderness for the plucky, one-legged fox sparrow that had
consorted with them all winter, went in to find them a choice handful
of scraps. But when, a few minutes later, I entered my chamber, there
outside his accus