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Updated: May 31, 2025
Masters, smiling. "Diana, your mother makes no objections." And rising, he went and gravely kissed her. I do not know what tied Mrs. Starling's tongue. She sat before the fire with her hands in her lap, in an inward fury of dull displeasure; she had untold objections to this arrangement; and yet, though she knew she must speak now or never, she could not speak.
She did not know the difference! "I guess your father misses you when you all go away," remarked Mrs. Flandin, who had hardly spoken, at least aloud. The reply was prevented, for Mrs. Starling's waggon drew up at the foot of the steps, and Mrs. Reverdy hastened down to give her assistance to the ladies in alighting.
Duty was left a dry tree; and more, a tree so full of thorns that she could not touch it without being stung and pierced. Yet even so; to this stake of duty she was bound. Diana sat cheerlessly gazing out into the June sunlight, which laughed at her with no power to gain a smile in return; when a step came along the narrow entry, and the doorway was filled with Mrs. Starling's presence.
Starling's house; it had no giant elms to hang over it and veil its uncomelinesses. But just behind it rose a green hill; the house, indeed, stood on the lower slope of the hill, which fell off more gently towards the bottom; behind the house it lifted up a very steep, rocky wall, yet not so steep but that it was grown with beautiful forest trees.
So the winter went; a winter which was ever after a blank in Diana's remembrance; and the cold weather broke up into the frosts and thaws that sugar-makers love; and in such a March day it was, the word came to Mrs. Starling's house that old Squire Bowdoin was dead. The like weather never failed in after years to bring back to Diana that one day and its tidings and the strange shock they gave her.
I was asked "if it was a very rare bird?" It seemed almost absurd to have to reply, "No, only a common starling;" but people are so accustomed to see a caged pet flutter in terror at its unusual surroundings, that my kingly Richard rather puzzled his admirers. When we began life in our apartments, one important consideration in the day's proceedings was the starling's food.
There, by the same energetic ordering, well seconded by Diana, a mattress was brought and laid on the long table, which Mrs. Starling's diligence had already cleared since supper; and there they placed the girl, who was perfectly helpless and motionless in their hands. "There is life yet," said the minister, after an examination during which every one stood breathless around.
"Don't you think we know that you are Nils the goose boy, who tore down the swallow's nest last year, crushed the starling's eggs, threw baby crows in the marl-ditch, caught thrushes in snares, and put squirrels in cages? You just help yourself as well as you can; and you may be thankful that we do not form a league against you, and drive you back to your own kind!"
"Why 'purlieus'?" was the Starling's inquiry. Harrowby shrugged his shoulders ever so lightly. "Well, one isn't searching for reasons founded on copy-book axioms," he shook his head. "Coombe? No." There was a silence given to occult thought. "Feather is really in a rage and is too Feathery to be able to conceal it," said Starling.
We went in, and found no soul in any room as we wandered from room to room, from the rose-covered porch to the strange and quaint garrets amongst the great timbers of the roof, where of old time the tillers and herdsmen of the manor slept, but which a-nights seemed now, by the small size of the beds, and the litter of useless and disregarded matters bunches of dying flowers, feathers of birds, shells of starling's eggs, caddis worms in mugs, and the like seemed to be inhabited for the time by children.
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