“What?” he asked nervously. In answer, she sang to the same tune: Ma-ri-nee-ro, and then said: “The sailors used to sing it at Cadiz, that autumn we spent there ... when the children were little.”
“By Jove, yes, so they did!” he answered with a self-deprecatory laugh.
The thrush had now succeeded in hauling up almost the whole length of the worm; and it lay on the ground really very like the coils of a miniature rope. Then suddenly he lost the rhythm, changed his method to a series of little jerky, impatient, ineffectual desultory taps, pausing between each to look round with a bright distrait eye; and, finally, when a few more taps would have finished the job, off he hopped, as if he could bear it no longer.
“Silly fellow!” said the Doña.
Dick was racking his brain in the hopes of finding some link between thrushes and Pepa.... “Pepa was very fond of thrushes” ... but was she?... “Pepa with the garden hose was rather like that thrush with the worm” ... and wasn’t there an infant malady called “thrush” ... had Pepa ever had it? no, no, it wouldn’t do; later on an apter occasion would arise for some tender little reconciliatory reminiscence.
“You know, I had little Anna and Jasper baptised into the Catholic Church at Christmas,” said the Doña suddenly, and, as it seemed to Dick, quite irrelevantly; but her voice was unmistakably friendly.
“By Jove ... did you really?”
“I did. I arranged it with Father Dawson. The children enjoyed keeping it a secret from Harry.”
Dick chuckled; the Doña smiled.
“Next year little Anna will make her first Communion.”