The clothes-prop Betty plunged to the bottom, and lifted. No struggling black shape writhed about it. She repeated the movement, and this time we all cried out, for she brought up the dark discoloured rag of a sash of the penny doll, the penny doll clinging to it and immediately dropping sullenly back again. Grown brave, Betty stirred the water, and Delia, advancing, did the same with her axe-handle. Again and again these were lifted, revealing nothing. At last we faced it: No snake was there.
“So that’s a lie, too,” said Delia, brutally.
We stared at one another. I, as the one chiefly disappointed, looked away. I looked down the street: Mr. Branchett was hoeing in his garden. Delivery wagons were rattling by. The butter-man came whistling round the house. Everybody seemed so busy and so sure. They looked as if they knew why everything was. And to us, truth and justice and reason and the results to be expected in this grown-up world were all a confusion and a thorn.
As we went round the house, talking of what had happened, our eyes were caught by a picture which should have been, and was not, of quite casual and domestic import. On the side-porch of Delia’s house appeared her mother, hanging out Delia’s canary.
“Good-bye,” said Delia, briefly, and fared from us, running.
We lingered for a little in the front yard. In five minutes the curtains in Delia’s room stirred, and we saw her face appear, and vanish. She had not waved to us—there was no need. It had overtaken her. She, too, was “in her room.”
Delicacy dictated that we withdraw from sight, and we returned to the back yard. As we went, Mary Elizabeth was asking:
“Is telling a lie and not feeding your canary as wicked as each other?”
It seemed incredible, and we said so.
“Well, you get shut up just as hard for both of ’em,” Mary Elizabeth reminded us.