savage spring? How swiftly she fell upon it. With her hand. With her foot. With her grandfather's stick... Her one care was to save Fifi from the clutches of that little tiger... There — the marks of its scratching still run along

the length of her fingers... From that hour the cage's nail rose two spans higher on the balcony wall, and the cat lost every hope of easy spoils. And oh, her calamity when she came once to look in on him and found the cage empty, an uncanny silence brooding over it, mocking her! How she hated herself! How she called down death upon her own head! For she realized that it was she and no one else who had forgotten the cage door open!! Was he strong enough for flight and soaring, or did he stumble and fall? Did he find food in those gardens to stay his hunger? Or did the neighbors' black cat snatch him and work its fangs and claws upon him?! Woe to him if it did!... Woe to him!

What Randa brooded over and questioned that day, in the realm of her feeling and her fears for Fifi, was in truth only a part of her great grief for him. No wonder her brother doubted the truth of the dreams she kept recounting to him whenever she woke from sleep: all of them about Fifi!! Either she had met him in the garden, hiding behind a leaf and eyeing her slyly; or he had come fluttering about the cage, playful and affectionate; or she had come home from school and found him standing in his place, singing and caroling, or swaying and dipping his wing, luxuriant in color and shade... How often she sighed with long-ing in her secret heart, wishing that dreams might one day come true... might last! — so that her happiness would not come tumbling down the moment she opened her eyes and they came to rest on top of the wardrobe...

...For a whole month Randa went on living in hope. She would hang

the cage in its place and leave its door wide open, the drinking water brimming, the seed cup overflowing with canary seed, lettuce leaves dangling from his cage, fresh figs pressed onto the sticks — everything in the fashion that was Fifi's own... He would surely return, she kept assuring herself; where in the whole world would he find such comfort and plenty? He was coming back... certainly coming back.

But Fifi did not come back, and the little girl set about lulling her disappointment against her will; and when doubt got the better of her, she cleaned the cage, in despair, of the leavings of food, and set it away on the top of the wardrobe... And in the hope of "perhaps" she left its door wide open... Who knows??... Who knows when the miracle might happen?!

There must be an outcome... a solution. Every problem has its solution, however stubborn — so says her teacher... and so says her mother too. She could, for instance, save up money enough to buy another canary, and be more watchful than before in keeping him!

From that day Randa's life took on a new meaning. Her existence had a goal to strive for. It began to seem to her, as she swayed before the mirror, that she had grown less plump and round thanks to her "voluntary" abstention from eating sweets... And she took to inventing excuses for forsaking the cinema, coming back on the sly to add the half-lira to the contents of the money box, listening with relish to its ringing metallic rattle, reck-oning within herself the amount that must by now have gathered inside the round box — and would it, she wondered, suffice to buy a canary?!

She remembers well coming home one day from school, when a companion showed her a shop at the bend of a nearby street,

from whose walls craned dozens of cane cages in which birds flitted about, of every color and wing. How she would have loved to stay there, rapt and dazzled, letting her gaze wander among the goldfinches and the bulbuls in the flood of their crying and chirping... She saw among them only a single canary! How her heart leapt at first, taking him for Fifi himself — but for a row of white feathers circling his neck, such as Fifi never had... How she craved to hug that yellow bird with the lifted breast... to wet his feathers with kisses... But nothing of the kind happened. There she is, turning back and feigning indifference, resolved to redouble her efforts, while the seller's voice challenged her hearing: "This canary is unique, a rarity. I will not sell him for less than twenty-five liras!"

In this manner Randa lived through the months, her soul greeted by a certain contentment over a diligence she had persisted in, carrying out a plan for which she alone was responsible, working toward its fulfillment with all the deep gladness that attends sacrifice and self-denial... Until yesterday came — the hour her mother woke her, suddenly, out of deepest sleep, and hastened to put her coat on her and lead her with her brother to the open square outside the house, where the neighbors had gathered in their nightclothes, crying out in loud voices, all of them in a state of violent terror.

...In her daze she paid no heed. She grasped no meaning in it until she had recovered some of her senses and pieced the ends of the story together from here and there... It was an earthquake... nay, three successive shocks, the like of which the town had never known.

She had not witnessed the "engagement" that drove the people — all the people — fleeing from their beds into the open,