"What, a tame one?"
"Well, you can tame it if you like. I caught one yesterday in the glen — a beauty. You can have it for ninepence."
"And where am I going to get the nine-pence?"
"Why, you had half-a-crown the other day."
Jack shrugged his shoulders; money never would stop in his pockets for any length of time,
"I've only got twopence halfpenny now."
"All right! then I shall let Greaves have the bird; he asked me for it. I'll blind it to-night."
Jack's level brows contracted into a frown.
"Let the thing alone, can't you!" he said angrily. "What d'you want to blind it for? It 'll sing right enough without that."
At this second display of mawkishness in his captain Billy permitted himself a little snigger.
"Why, Jack, I didn't think you were so soft! Of course I'm going to blind it; it's the proper way. There's nothing to make all that fuss about; you just stick a needle into a cork and make it red-hot and ------"
"Let me see the bird before you do it," Jack interrupted imperiously. "I'll get done by tea-time."
He walked away, his forehead still contracted. Perhaps the dash of Hungarian blood inherited from his mother was responsible for the overweening personal pride which made any suspicion of ridicule so intolerably galling to him. He rated himself fiercely for caring who peeped and sniggered at "beastly" sights, or put out a wild bird's eyes. What was it all to him that he should mind so much? Nobody else ever minded those things.
Nevertheless, the grey-bird and the hot needle kept getting in the way of the Latin verses the whole afternoon, and Jack's temper grew worse and worse. His education and surroundings, the steady hardening process through which he had been put, had come near to grinding out of him whatever natural softness he might originally have possessed; and, being inordinately proud of his reputation as the most callous reprobate of the district, he was afflicted with a kind of shame every time any thing touched upon one of those little sensitive spots, of whose existence no one knew but himself.