He stopped short for a moment, for as the evening sun swept its veil of
rainbow radiance over the scene, the bird began to sing. Its little
throat swelled, it chirruped, it trilled, it called, it soared, it lost
itself in a flood of ecstasy. In the applausive silence, the emotional
recess of the sale, as it were, the man to whom the bird and the song
meant most, pushed his way up to the stand where M. Manotel stood. When
the people saw who it was, they fell back, for there was that in his face
which needed no interpretation. It filled them with a kind of awe.

He reached up a brown, eager, affectionate hand--it had always been that
--fat and small, but rather fine and certainly emotional, though not
material or sensual.

"Go on with your bidding," he said.

He was going to buy the thing which had belonged to his daughter, was
beloved by her--the living oracle of the morning, the muezzin of his
mosque of home. It had been to the girl who had gone as another such a
bird had been to the mother of the girl, the voice that sang, "Praise
God," in the short summer of that bygone happiness of his. Even this
cage and its homebird were not his; they belonged to the creditors.

"Go on. I buy--I bid," Jean Jacques said in a voice that rang. It had
no blur of emotion. It had resonance. The hammer that struck the bell
of his voice was the hammer of memory, and if it was plaintive it also
was clear, and it was also vibrant with the silver of lost hopes.

M. Manotel humoured him, while the bird still sang. "Four dollars--five
dollars: do I hear no more than five dollars?--going once, going twice,