strove to wrench herself away, shouting:

"He raised Lazarus from the dead for Mary his sister, and she had been a
shameless wench. And He gave the other back her boy. What has He done for
me?"

The sisterly arm held her fast; the great grey eyes looked into hers, wet
with the tears that were denied to her.

"He has given you an Angel to pray for you in Heaven."

She snorted rebelliously:

"His mother wants him down here.... And what is Heaven to little Dierck,
when he could be sailing his boat in the river-pools, and playing at
driving the span?"

But she let the Mother-Superior take him from her, and dropped her great
arms doggedly at her sides, watching still dry-eyed as they laid him down,
and Saxham stooped above him, feeling at the pulseless heart. She saw the
doktor shake his head and lay down the little hand. She saw the
Mother-Superior coax down the eyelids with tender, skilful fingers, and
put a kiss on each, making the Sign of the Cross on the still, childish
breast, and murmuring a little prayer. She would have screamed to avert
the defiling, heathen thing from him, but the memory of the sister-embrace
and the sister-look held her dumb.

It was only when they were stripping him for the last sad toilet, and the
cherished top and half a dozen highly-prized marbles rolled out of the
pocket in the stumpy little round jacket she had made out of a cast-off
garment of his father's that her bosom heaved, and the fountains of her
grief sprang from the stony soil. She wept copiously, and found
resignation. Soon she was sufficiently herself to scold a
prodigally-minded spinster relative who had proposed that Little Dierck
should be coffined in his new black Sabbath suit.

"But you old maids have no sense, no more than so many cabbages. Little
angels in the hemel can fly about in clean nightgowns--look in the
grandfather's big picture-Bible if you don't believe me. But live boys
can't loop about without breeches. So I'll lay these by for the next one."

XXXIII

Roasting hot Christmas has gone by, with its services and celebrations,
its sports and entertainments, its meagre feasting, and its hearty cheer,
a bloodless triumph followed by the regrettable defeat sustained in the
battle of Big Tree Fort. To-day the Union Jack hangs limp upon the
flagstaff that rears its slender height over Nixey's, and the new year is
some weeks old. The blue, blue sky of January is without a single puff of
cloud, and th