Mr. Yaffon rose from examining a bed of tulips; blinking his dim eyes, he stood listening, with his head against his shoulder. Deliberately, without any show of anger, he sauntered up to the parrot, caught him by the neck and wrung it. It was so coolly done that it seemed to have been long premeditated. It looked like murder. The gurgling of that thin voice, so like Mr. Yaffon’s, protesting as it sank into the silence, “But I love you. I love you,” gave Teddy the shudders.
Mr. Yaffon got a spade, dug a hole, and buried the parrot. When he had patted down the mold, he went into the house and returned in a few minutes with a basketful of letters. With the same unhurried purpose, he walked down the path towards his tool-shed, made a pile of dead branches, and set a bonfire going. A breeze which was blowing in gusts rescued one of the papers and led Mr. Yaffon a chase across lawns and flower beds. Just as he was on the point of capturing it, the wind lifted it spitefully over the wall into Mr. Gurney’s garden.
Teddy, who had watched these doings with all his curiosity aroused, lost no time in hurrying down from the bedroom. In a lilac bush he found the lost paper. It was a letter, yellowed by age, charred with fire and written in a fine Italian hand—a woman’s. It read:
My dear Penny-Whistles,
You don’t like me calling you Penny-Whistles, do you? You mustn’t be angry with me for laughing at your voice: I can laugh and still like you. But can I laugh and still marry you? That’s the question. I’m afraid my sense of humor——
Teddy stopped. He realized that he was spying. He knew at last what Mr. Yaffon had been doing: burning up his dead regrets. The letter had already slipped from his hand, when the ivy behind him commenced to rustle. The top of a ladder appeared above the wall, followed by Mr. Yaffon’s head. It sounded as though the parrot had come to life.
“Little boy,” he said, in his squeaky voice, “a very important letter has—— Ah, there it is. To be sure! Right at your feet, boy. Make yourself tall and I’ll lean down for it. There, we’ve managed it. Thank you.”
When the head and the ladder had vanished, Teddy stood in the sunshine pondering. The spring was stirring. Everything was beginning afresh. Then he, too, lit a fire. When it was crackling merrily, he ran indoors to a cupboard. Standing on a chair, he dragged from a corner a box across whose lid was scrawled the one word MARRIAGE. Tucking it under his jacket, he escaped into the garden and rammed the box well down into the embers. As he watched it perish, he whispered to himself: “Silly kid—that’s what I was.”
No doubt Mr. Yaffon was telling himself the same thing, only in different language.
Then the child, on his side of the wall, strolled away to dream of pigeons; and the older child, on the other side, stooped above his flowers.