"And why?" mused the Dartford Warbler, resuming at the point where he had left off.
To Mr. Carmody, conscious now of a devouring hunger, the spectacle of this bloated bird was the last straw. He struck out at it in a spasm of irritation and nearly overbalanced. The Warbler uttered a shrill exclamation of terror and disappeared, looking like an absconding bookmaker. Mr. Carmody huddled back against the window, palpitating. And more time passed.
It was at half-past seven, when he was beginning to feel that he had not tasted food since boyhood, that there sounded from somewhere below on his right a shrill whistling.
II
He looked cautiously down. It gave him acute vertigo to do so, but he braved this in his desire to see. Since his vigil began, he had heard much whistling. In addition to the Garrulus Glandarius Rufitergum and the Corvus Monedula Spermologus, he had been privileged for the last hour or so to listen to a concert featuring such artists as the Dryobates Major Anglicus, the Sturnus Vulgaris, the Emberiza Curlus, and the Muscicapa Striata, or Spotted Flycatcher: and, a moment before, he would have said that in the matter of whistling he had had all he wanted. But this latest outburst sounded human. It stirred in his bosom something approaching hope.
So Mr. Carmody, craning his neck, waited: and presently round the corner of the house, a towel about his shoulders, suggesting that he was on his way to take an early morning dip in the moat, came his nephew Hugo.
Mr. Carmody, as this chronicle has shown, had never entertained for Hugo quite that warmth of affection which one likes to see in an uncle toward his nearest of kin, but at the present moment he could not have appreciated him more if he had been a millionaire anxious to put up capital for a new golf course in the park.
"Hoy!" he cried, much as the beleaguered garrison of Lucknow must have done to the advance guard of the relieving Highlanders. "Hoy!"
Hugo stopped. He looked to his right, then to his left, then in front of him, and then, turning, behind him. It was a spectacle that chilled in an instant the new sensation of kindness which his uncle had been feeling toward him.