Page:Quiller-Couch - Noughts and Crosses.djvu/243

Rh breast and looked down on it. The God who fashions children can tell where she learnt that look, and why I remembered it ten years later, when they let me look into the room where she lay with another babe in her clay-cold arms.

"Count forty," she went on, using the very words of Pretty Tommy, our parish clerk; "count forty, and let fly with 'Now draw around'"

We sang the carol softly together, she resting one hand on the edge of the manger.

"Dick, ain't you proud of him? I don't see the spiders beginning, though."

"The spiders?"

"Dick, you're very ig-norant. Everybody knows that, when Christ was laid in a manger, the spiders came and spun their webs over Him and hid Him. That's why King Herod couldn't find Him."

"There, now! We live and learn," said I.

"Well, now there's nothing to do but sit