Her Birthday

1?

served, exclaiming, “I put my eyes down
—which meant that so far as she was
concerned the episode was now definitively
closed.

My day-dream was broken by W. V. flying
up to me with fern fronds fastened to her
shoulders for wings. She fluttered round me,
then flopped into my lap, and put her arms
about my neck. “If I was a real swan,
father, I would cuddle your head with my
wings.”

“Ah, well, you are a real duck, Diddles,
and that will do quite as well.”

She was thinking of that tender Irish
legend of the Children of Lir, changed into
swans by their step-mother and doomed to
suffer heat and cold, tempest and hunger,
homelessness and sorrow, for nine hundred
years, till the sound of the first Christian
bell changed them again —to frail, aged
human creatures. It was always the sister,
she knows, who solaced and strengthened
the brothers beside the terrible sea of Moyle,
sheltering them under her wings and warm-
ing them against her bosom. In sucha case

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