It had been a tender and nourishing chicken; the hours she had spent in gnawing through her rope had been well repaid.
'Oh! you darlin' wicked little thing!' wailed Hazel. 'You munna do it,
Foxy, or he'll drown you dead. What for did you do it, Foxy, my dear?'
Foxy's eyes became more eloquent and more liquid.
'You gallus little blessed!' said Hazel again. 'Eh! I wish you and me could live all alone by our lonesome where there was no men and women.'
Foxy shut her eyes and yawned, evidently feeling doubtful if such a halcyon place existed in the world.
Hazel sat on her heels and thought. It was flight or Foxy. She knew that if she did not take Foxy away, her renewed naughtiness was as certain as sunset.
'You was made bad,' she said sadly but sympathetically. 'Leastways, you wasn't made like watch-dogs and house-cats and cows. You was made a fox, and you be a fox, and its queer-like to me, Foxy, as folk canna see that. They expect you to be what you wanna made to be. You'm made to be a fox; and when you'm busy being a fox they say you'm a sinner!'
Having wrestled with philosophy until Foxy yawned again, Hazel went in to try her proposition on Abel. But Abel met it as the world in general usually meets a new truth.
'She took the chick,' he said. 'Now, would a tarrier do that—a well-trained tarrier? I says 'e would not'
'But it inna fair to make the same law for foxes and terriers.'