“But I want to hear the rest of the story. Never mind the differences in the telling of it.”

“I’m afraid I can’t get into the current of it now.”

“You can look at the book! It must be somewhere among all these!”

“No doubt. But I haven’t time to look for it now.”

“It won’t take you a minute to find it.”

“I must not leave my work.”

“Just one tiny minute,” pleaded Barbara.

“Let me explain to you, miss. I find the only way to be sure I don’t cheat on my time is to know of a certainty I haven’t stopped for an instant to do anything for myself. Sometimes when I have stopped for a while, and then when I wanted to make up the time, I couldn’t be quite sure how long it was that I owed. So that caused me to give more than I needed—which is a good enough thing to do most of the time, but which I don’t want to do when I could be reading instead. When the time is my own, it is of far more value to me for the insides than to my employer for the outsides of the books. So you see, for my own sake as well as his, I cannot stop till my time is up.”

“That is being honest!”

“I would as soon pick a pocket as undertake a job and not do it diligently.”

Barbara begged no more.

“But I can talk while I work,” Richard went on, “and I will try to remember.”

“Please, please do.”

Richard thought a little, and presently resumed the poem and went on. As he spoke, Barbara looked down at the bird in her lap.

It opened its dark eyes once more—then quivered a little, and lay still. She burst into tears.

Richard dropped his work and made a step toward her.

“Never mind,” she said. “I will be all right. But I have to cry for the bird. The bird is dead, and I am glad. I will let it lie a little, and then bury it. If it be anywhere now, perhaps it will one day know me, and then it will love me. Please go on with the poem. It will make me forget.”

Slowly Richard resumed the narrative, with breaks here and there. Gradually Barbara’s tears dried and she forgot her sorrow. Every few stanzas Richard would stop and explain something, or answer a question Barbara had raised. Occasionally when he could not exactly remember the verses, he would extemporize in prose, to fill in the gist of the story. Barbara sat like one enchanted with a whole new world of thought and rhyme and meaning, added to in the depths of her being by the unfolding of her consciousness toward the reality of God’s care for his world brought on by the death of the pigeon. Before either knew it, more than two hours had passed.

Someone had entered the room at the other end, the door of which had been open all the time. But the sky was so cloudy and the twilight so far advanced that neither of them, Barbara absorbed in the poem and Richard in the last of his day’s work, had heard anyone enter.