They made a very pretty picture in the gloaming. Titus had not as many varieties as his friend Charlie had, but still he had a goodly number. There were dark Jacobins, with nodding red hoods surrounding their white faces; pure white Jacobins and buff Jacobins; clean-shaped, slender magpies; graceful archangels; shell-crested, nasal tufted priests; cobby frill-backs with reversed feathering; swallows; tumblers; runts; demure nuns in black and white costumes with white hoods passing below their side curls; and globular cropped poulters.
Bethany surveyed them in profound silence. The Judge, striving to read her face, could make nothing of it but confusion.
Finally he put out a hand to steady her. The child was swaying.
“Do you feel ill?” he asked, gazing apprehensively at her deathly white face.
She nodded. “Yes, sir, Bethany feels sick.”
He took her in his arms and carried her downstairs, and the discomforted Titus, after a farewell glance at his beautiful birds, followed disconsolately behind. He had so hoped that the little girl would like them. She had seemed to like Princess Sukey. Well, girls were queer. Boys were much more satisfactory.
“What is the matter with you?” asked the Judge when he had set Bethany on her feet.
“Sir,” she said, in a whisper and looking up at him with an awed face, “Was it heaven or were they ghosts?”
The Judge tried to do some thinking. It was hard for a man of his age to send himself back to childhood—and then he had not been an imaginative child. But he tried to think of himself as highly strung, as having a passion for dumb creatures, as being poor and unable to have pets about him, and then suddenly to be confronted with a number of beautiful specimens of the bird world.
Yes, he could just faintly picture to himself something of Bethany’s ecstasy. The child had been overcome.