ikes to
drop them in for me. I had now to admit that Wheeler & Gibb made the
boxes.

"But I made the labels myself, David."

"They are not so well made as the boxes," he replied.

Thus I have reason to wish ill to Mary's work of imagination, as I
presumed it to be, and I said to him with easy brutality, "Tell her
about the boxes, David, and that no one can begin a book until they are
all full. That will frighten her."

Soon thereafter he announced to me that she had got a box.

"One box!" I said with a sneer.

"She made it herself," retorted David hotly.

I got little real information from him about the work, partly because
David loses his footing when he descends to the practical, and perhaps
still more because he found me unsympathetic. But when he blurted out
the title, "The Little White Bird," I was like one who had read the
book to its last page. I knew at once that the white bird was the little
daughter Mary would fain have had. Somehow I had always known that she
would like to have a little daughter, she was that kind of woman, and
so long as she had the modesty to see that she could not have one, I
sympathised with her deeply, whatever I may have said about her book to
David.

In those days Mary had the loveliest ideas for her sad little book, and
they came to her mostly in the morning when she was only three-parts
awake, but as she stepped out of bed they all flew away like startled
birds. I gathered from David that this depressed her exceedingly.

Oh, Mary, your thoughts are much too pretty and holy to show themselves
to anyone but yourself. The shy things are hiding within you. If they
could come into the open they would not be a book, they would be little
Barbara.

But that was not the message I sent her. "She will never be able to
write it," I explained to David. "She has not the ability. Tell her I
said that."

I remembered now that for many months I had heard nothing of her
ambitious project, so I questioned David and discovered that it was
abandoned. He could not say why, nor was it necessary that he should,
the trivial little reason was at once so plain to me. From that moment
all my sympathy with Mary was spilled, and I searched for some means of
exulting over her until I found it. It was this. I decided, unknown even
to David, to write the book "The Little White Bird," of which she had
proved herself incapable, and then when, in the fulness of time, she
held her baby on high, implying t