“You--as I remarked before--are getting into the sad habit of forgetting your most faithful friends and honest admirers. Why this is Bolingbroke!” And she pointed with an upward toss of her obstinate little chin to a gilded swing whereon reposed, in magnificent dignity, a great white cockatoo, crested and tailed with brilliant orange. Some subterranean disturbance was agitating his snowy breast feathers, and his round eyes, dilated with greed, watched Marguerite’s every move as she fed the lesser luminaries below. “Oh, you wretched usurper!” She addressed him grandiloquently. “This form of food would neither suit nor please you, and yet you covet it! Isn’t that very human?” she tragically demanded of Basil, who had at last managed to summon an apology for a laugh to his assistance. “Remind yourself,” she went on flippantly, “that, unlike some others of his kind, he cannot express his desires by word of beak. Repressed inclinations are hard to bear, but the impossibility of ever giving them voice, excepting by shrieks of distress, must be awful indeed!” Basil was watching her intently, trying in vain to discover whether she was quite as joyful as she seemed. “Would you oblige me by making a long arm--you are so agreeably tall--and presenting this token of our joint regard to yonder regicide?” she resumed, indicating a majolica wooden shoe on a table close by. “No, not the whole thing; _one_ of the therein-contained biscuits ... _please_!” And while complying with her request Basil was thinking, thinking, thinking! “What a coward I am! Why not tell her the truth? What’s the use of shirking the task because it hurts me to do the right thing? And what would she really care, this heavenly baby, with her toys, her exquisite amusements, her deadly simplicity? She will not miss me a moment of all those years to come.” “_Poverino!_” Marguerite was meanwhile apostrophizing the ill-tempered bird. “Here, you! Accept this offering gently if you can. It is well meant, and the biscuit is good and sweet! _Mille grazie, eccellenze_,” she added to Basil. “I am in an Italian mood to-day, as you may perceive. This gracious retreat looks Italian, I think; so do the camellias, and the blue sky over our crystalline dome; so do these little pet vassals of mine; feeding from the hand, as all properly self-respecting vassals should do.” She tossed the rest of her fistful of seeds to the Bengalis, the gold and green finches, the slim Holland canaries, the redcaps, and twenty other chiefs of tribe whirling around on the sanded floor of their palatial abode to snatch the tempting breakfast from one another. “They _are_ human,” he harshly commented while following their airy gyrations, “hence quarrelsome and envious, just like Bolingbroke. Too bad that such innocent-looking creatures should have such beastly faults!”