In the short story The Bird with the Broken Wing, Mabelle Annesley and her husband are guests together with Mr Satterthwaite at a dinner party at Laidell organised to serve as the setting for the announcement of the engagement of Madge Keeley to Roger Graham. Mabelle is the youngest daughter of the Clydesley family which had always had a history of tragedy. To Satterthwaite, while someone like Madge may be thought of as pretty, Mabelle has the mysterious quality of "enchantment". "She might have been one of those creatures who are only half-human--one of the Hidden People from the Hollow Hills. She made everyone else look rather too real...."
After dinner, Mr Satterthwaite found Mabelle alone in the Terrace Room strumming her ukelele. She told Satterthwaite that she had been walking in the woods earlier that day and she had met someone whom the light through the trees "made him look like a kind of harlequin". She told Satterthwaite she wanted to be alone "because I'm happy" like when one stands "in a big wood with dark shadows ... and then suddenly ... you see the country of your dreams--shining and beautiful...." What happens subsequently forms the main plot of the story.