‘Are you going to give the little lark what it wants?’ asked Ninnie-Dinnie, watching the bird, which was still fluttering against the bottle-green pane.
‘No!’ said Joan decidedly. ‘I don’t think I ought. It do make my heart young an’ happy again.’
‘I was hoping you would like to give back the lark its music and its song,’ said Ninnie-Dinnie.
‘Whatever for, cheeld-vean?’[21] Joan asked.
‘Because,’ answered the child, ‘I have been wondering what the lark’s little mate will do if he hasn’t his song to sing to her now she is sitting on her pretty eggs out on the grass.’
‘Why, make another song, of course, you foolish little knaw-nothing!’ cried Joan, laying her pain-twisted fingers on the child’s elfin locks.
‘It has no music to make a song with; it gave it all to me to take home to my dear Mammie Trebisken,’ said the little maid.
Once more the lark’s song came out of the Pail, and Joan said it was sweeter and wilder and freer than even the second time. As she listened intently she was carried to her courting days, when she and Tom took their Sunday walks through the growing corn and flaming poppies to hear the larks sing. Then as the songster came earthward again and its music died away into the silence of the years, or into the Pail, she was too bewildered to say which, there appeared on the threshold of the door the little lark, which, as she looked at it, trailed its wings and piped: ‘Give me back my music! Give me back my song!’ and its sad cry went right down into her pitiful heart.
‘I was a selfish body to want to keep what didn’t belong to me,’ she cried, and she told Ninnie-Dinnie to give it back what it wanted.
‘I can’t give back: you only can do that,’ said the little maid. ‘I can only bring you what you ask.’