At that she coloured and dropped her eyes from my face.
"Perhaps I exaggerated," she said weakly, and sat smoothing the table-cloth on each side of her with her fingers. She glanced up at me. I was still looking at her. She glanced from me to her father. He was waiting for her answer, utterly at a loss.
"But I like owls," she said again in a queer little, high-pitched, plaintive voice; and somehow I began to laugh, and in a moment she was laughing too. "You make too much of the trouble," said she.
"We will have him out to-morrow," said Mr. Curwen; and again she laughed, but with something of mischief, so that though for that night there the matter dropped, I suspected she had devised some plan by which I was to suffer a penalty for her present discomfiture. And that suspicion I found to be true no later than the next morning.
For while we were yet at breakfast, Mr. Curwen returned to the subject, and was for sending out Mary Tyson to fetch in one of the shepherds in order to oust the bird.
"Yes, indeed," cries Dorothy, with a delighted little clap of the hands and a quick meaning glance at Mary Tyson.
The shepherds were all on the hillside; not one of them was within reach, said Mary, with suspicious promptitude.
"But we have a ladder," said Dorothy, speaking at me, and her eyes sparkling and dancing.
I made as though I had not heard the suggestion.
"Then I will myself hunt him out," said Mr. Curwen, with a ready eagerness to make proof of his activity.