e a female,
can it?"

"I should trust not, for the sake of a body's sex . . . to say things
like that. Besides, I've surely been told somewhere--in the 'Child's
Guide to Knowledge,' it may have been--that the females don't talk at
all."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Pretty sure. It was _something_ unnatural anyhow; or I shouldn' have
remembered it."

"Well, and if so," said Mrs Bosenna, "one can see what Providence was
driving at, which is always a comfort. . . . I was wondering now if you
mind going and carrying him out to the garden somewhere. He couldn't
take harm in this weather,--under the box-hedge, for instance."

Dinah shook her head. "I couldn', mistress; no really!"

"The chances are," said Mrs Bosenna persuasively, "he wouldn't say
anything,--anything like that again, not in a blue moon."

"He said it to me first, and he said it to me again not ten minutes
later. But, o' course, if you're so confident, there's nothing hinders
your goin' and takin' him where you like. If you ask my opinion,
though, he don't wait for no blue moons. He turns 'em blue as they
come."

Mrs Bosenna tapped her foot yet more pettishly. "It's perfectly
ridiculous," she declared, "to be kept out of one's own parlour by a
bird! Go and call in William Skin, and tell him to take away the nasty
thing."

"And him with a family?"

"He's hard of hearin'," said Mrs Bosenna.

"It's a hardness you can t depend on. I've knowed William hear fast
enough,--when he wasn't wanted. He'll be wantin' to know, too, why we
can't put the bird out for ourselves: his deafness makes him suspicious.
. . . And what's more," wound up Dinah, "it won't help us, one way or
'nother, whether he hears or not. We shall go about _thinkin_ he's heard;
and I tell ye, mistress, I shan't be able to face that man again without
a blush, not in my born life."

"It's perfectly ridiculous, I tell you!" repeated Mrs Bosenna, starting
to her feet. "Am I to be forced to breakfast in the kitchen because of
a bird?"

"Then, if so be as you're so proud as all that, why not go back to bed
again, and I'll bring breakfast up to your room."

"Nonsense. Where d'ye keep the beeswax? And run you up to the little
store-cupboard and fetch me down a fingerful of cotton-wool for my ears.
I'll do it myself, since you're such a coward."

"'Tisn't that I'm a coward, mistress--"

"You're worse," interrupted her mistress severely.

"You never ought to know anything a