“Hold your tongue, silly child!” she said. “Francesco, you cannot impose upon the Scottish Signora. You know perfectly that in the time it takes you to snare the rondinelli and carry them to the market, you could earn twice as much by digging my garden. It is only because you are lazy and cruel that you prefer to make a few soldi by taking life. And what happens to the money? Ah, yes, indeed! How many soldi return with you out of the little wine-shop in the Via Cavour? Eh, you, Niccolo? Your wife told me some pretty things when she was ill. And Francesco need not grin, for he is little better. You will set the birds free at once, or I promise you get no help from me the next time trouble comes.”

Niccola and Francesco accepted the situation. They had been at work snaring the lake swallows since before dawn; but now they merely looked once at one another and shrugged.

Aunt Perdy grasped a bunch of Niccolo’s birds, but at first Joanna was afraid to touch the little creatures. She could not believe that they were not maimed. But Francesco showed her smilingly how each one had the tips of its wings twisted together, and then tied with thread, so that several dozen could be strung conveniently on a single string. All the Signorina had to do, was to cut the threads, and straighten the feathers afterwards. But she must hold the bird’s body firmly all the while, or in struggling it might break a wing or a leg before it was ready to fly off. He gave her a penknife to work with. Aunt Perdy was snipping away, recklessly it seemed to Joanna, with her huge shears.

As she took the first little, palpitating body in her left hand, Joanna’s heart throbbed with an almost painful elation.

She remembered Cousin Gerald and the chaffinches at Duntarvie, and how she had quivered when he had pointed his knife at her breast. Birds had always played a memorable part in her dreams, persisting there like a symbol. Sometimes she had dreamed she was holding her hands above her head, while hundreds of swallows passed through her widely spread fingers, brushing her skin deliciously with their feathers. At other times she was gazing up into a sky so thick-strewn with stars, with stars like seeds as they fly from the hand of the sower; when to her amazement and her great rapture, she perceived that they were not stars, but swallows – millions and millions of swallows, wheeling, and forming into innumerable companies for their autumnal flight. And the moon had turned their breasts into silver, and their wings into the glitter of diamonds.

These birds in her fingers now, were mostly a kind of lake swallow – black and white, fashioned for swiftness and a swooping flight. It seemed a wonder how they had ever been snared. They had vicious, yellow beaks with which they jabbed unceasingly at Joanna’s flesh; and their bright eyes though really quite expressionless, seemed wide with terror.