"Mother, give me one in a paper and I'll take it down town and match it."
Her mother laughed. "Match it, why they were made by hand years ago, and are worth ten dollars apiece."
"Oh, dear," breathed the little girl, and multiplied: "Two hundred dollars for twenty. Mother!"
The child stole silently out from the glistening array. Ten dollars apiece. And she and Gardiner at their last nursery tea-party.... Through the door, as she slipped away, she looked back at her mother, standing thoughtful over the rows of crystal. In the great mahogany cage which, like a small dark château, surmounted the pedestal of carved wood, the blackbird Jetty huddled on his perch. He was a superb specimen, black as jet, whence his name, a free woodland spirit, with a yellow bill like a crocus
flower, and piercing eyes. Bella passed under the cage and called up to him, "Sing, Jetty, sing."
Piped a blackbird from a beechwood spray,
"Little maid, slow wandering this way,
What's your name?" said he.
Little Bell had wandered through the glade,
She looked up between the beechwood's shade,
"Little Bell," said she....
The child crooned to the bird her schoolroom poem. In return, Jetty sang a short, brilliant little roulade, his one trained tune, which Bella had vainly tried to pick out on the piano. She never heard half so sweet a song from any bird.
"Jetty is my favourite singer," she had said to Antony. But as she lingered now under his cage in order to lengthen out the time, which, because of her aching conscience, was hanging heavy, Jetty blinked down at her as she stood with her hands behind her back, her face uplifted; he peered at her like a weird familiar spirit. "Listen, Jetty. Gardiner and I took those perfectly beautiful, expensive glasses for our tea party. He smashed all three of them. There was a glass for Gardiner, a glass for me and one for the uninvited guest—no, I mean the unexpected guest. Gardiner sat down on the glasses where I had put them out to wash them. He would have been awfully cut only he had father's overcoat on (one of father's old coats, we got it out of the camphor chest)." She ceased, for Jetty, in the midst of the confession, hopped down to take a valetudinarian peck at his yellow seeds.
"Now," murmured Bella, "the question is, shall I tell mother on an exciting day like this when she is worried and nervous, and, if I do tell her, wouldn't it be carrying tales on poor little Gardiner?"
Jetty, by his food cup, disheartened and discouraged and apparently in a profound melancholy, depressed Bella; she left him, turned and fled.