t it, on the high
shelf of the wardrobe as though her mother might come in at any minute,
put it on, and start for a walk. She sobbed again when she encountered
the tiny tear in the bottom of the couch, which her own baby fingers had
made in trying to enlarge a pirate's cave. That brought the days when
her parents were immortal and all-wise; when the home sitting-room,
where her father read the paper aloud, was a security against all the
formidable world outside.

But to these recollections Una could shut her heart. To one absurd
thing, because it was living, Una could not shut her heart--to the
senile canary.

Possibly she could have taken it with her, but she felt confusedly that
Dickie would not be appreciated in other people's houses. She evaded
asking the Sessionses to shelter the bird, because every favor that she
permitted from that smug family was a bond that tied her to their life
of married spinsterhood.

"Oh, Dickie, Dickie, what am I going to do with you?" she cried,
slipping a finger through the wires of the cage.

The canary hopped toward her and tried to chirp his greeting.

"Even when you were sick you tried to sing to me, and mother did love
you," she sighed. "I just can't kill you--trusting me like that."

She turned her back, seeking to solve the problem by ignoring it. While
she was sorting dresses--some trace of her mother in every fold, every
wrinkle of the waists and lace collars--she was listening to the bird in
the cage.

"I'll think of some way--I'll find somebody who will want you, Dickie
dear," she murmured, desperately, now and then.

After dinner and nightfall, with her nerves twanging all the more
because it seemed silly to worry over one dissolute old bird when all
her life was breaking up, she hysterically sprang up, snatched Dickie
from the cage, and trotted down-stairs to the street.

"I'll leave you somewhere. Somebody will find you," she declared.

Concealing the bird by holding it against her breast with a hand
supersensitive to its warm little feathers, she walked till she found
a deserted tenement doorway. She hastily set the bird down on a stone
balustrade beside the entrance steps. Dickie chirped more cheerily,
more sweetly than for many days, and confidingly hopped back to her
hand.

"Oh, I can't leave him for boys to torture and I can't take him,
I can't--"

In a sudden spasm she threw the bird into the air, and ran back
to the flat, sobbing, "I can't kill it--