wood Pup is at this moment, you see, chewing the strings out of
my shoes as an appetizer for her supper. How could I eat sweetbreads and
truffle, which I know Owen has already ordered, when I knew that more than
a hundred small children were at home crying for bread?"

"Ann, what is it that makes you so perfectly radiantly beautiful in that
faded linen smock and old corduroy skirt? Of course, you always were
beautiful, but now you look like--like--well, I don't know whether it is a
song I have heard or a picture I have seen." Bess leaned down and laid her
cheek against mine for a second.

"I'm going to tell you some day before long," I whispered as I kissed the
corner of her lips. "Now do take the twin fathers for a little spin up the
road and make them walk back from the gate. They have been suffering with
the Trojan warriors all day, and I know they must have exercise. Uncle
Cradd walks down for the mail each day, but father remains stationary. Your
method with them is perfect. Go take them while I supper and bed down the
farm."

"I know now the picture is by Tintoretto, and it's some place in Rome,"
Bess called back over her shoulder as she drove her car slowly around to
the front door to begin her conquest and deportation of my precious
ancients.

"Not painted by Tintoretto, but by the pagan Pan," I said to myself as I
turned into the barn door.

CHAPTER IX

When I came out with a bucket of the new wheat in my hand, I heard Bess and
her car departing, with Uncle Cradd's sonorous speech mingling with the
puff of the engine.

"We are all alone, Mr. G. Bird, and we love it, because then we can talk
comfortably about our Mr. Adam," I said to the Golden Bird as he followed
me around the side of the barn where a door had been cut by Pan himself to
make an entry into my improvised chicken-house.

Suddenly I was answered by a very interesting chuckling and clucking, and I
turned to see what had disengaged the attention of Mr. G. Bird from me and
my feed-bucket. The sight that met my eyes lifted the shadow that had lain
between the Golden Bird and me since the morning I had taken him in to see
his newly arrived progeny and had not been able to make him notice their
existence. Stretching out behind me was a trail of wheat that had dripped
from a hole in the side of the bucket, and along the sides of it the
paternal Bird was marshaling his reliable foster-mother, Mrs. Red Ally's
and all his own fluffy white pr