t see it through," said McCurdie.

* * * * *

A silence fell upon them as they sat round in the blaze with the
new-born babe wrapped in its odd swaddling clothes asleep on the pile of
fur coats, and it lasted until Sir Angus McCurdie looked at his watch.

"Good Lord," said he, "it's twelve o'clock."

"Christmas morning," said Biggleswade.

"A strange Christmas," mused Doyne.

McCurdie put up his hand. "There it is again! The beating of wings." And
they listened like men spellbound. McCurdie kept his hand uplifted, and
gazed over their heads at the wall, and his gaze was that of a man in a
trance, and he spoke:

"Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given--"

Doyne sprang from his chair, which fell behind him with a crash.

"Man--what the devil are you saying?"

Then McCurdie rose and met Biggleswade's eyes staring at him through the
great round spectacles, and Biggleswade turned and met the eyes of
Doyne. A pulsation like the beating of wings stirred the air.

The three wise men shivered with a queer exaltation. Something strange,
mystical, dynamic had happened. It was as if scales had fallen from
their eyes and they saw with a new vision. They stood together humbly,
divested of all their greatness, touching one another in the instinctive
fashion of children, as if seeking mutual protection, and they looked,
with one accord, irresistibly compelled, at the child.

At last McCurdie unbent his black brows and said hoarsely:

"It was not the Angel of Death, Doyne, but another Messenger that drew
us here."

The tiredness seemed to pass away from the great administrator's face,
and he nodded his head with the calm of a man who has come to the quiet
heart of a perplexing mystery.

"It's true," he murmured. "Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is
given. Unto the three of us."

Biggleswade took off his great round spectacles and wiped them.

"Gaspar, Melchior, Balthazar. But where are the gold, frankincense and
myrrh?"

"In our hearts, man," said McCurdie.

The babe cried and stretched its tiny limbs.

[Illustration: INSTINCTIVELY THEY ALL KNELT DOWN.]

Instinctively they all knelt down together to discover, if possible, and
administer ignorantly to, its wants. The scene had the appearance of an
adoration.

* * * * *

Then these three wise, lonely, childless men who, in furtherance of
their own greatness, had cut themselves adr