ng down the crack again when the sun passed from it.

To-day she prolonged her roamings right up the wall of the summer-house
and along a joist bare of all save dust, and--well, the spider walked
straight on, moving with little jerks as if by intermittent clockwork,
and she seemed to stroll right on top of the wasp lying curled up on
her side. Only when one of the latter's delicate feelers shifted round
towards her, as though in some uncanny way conscious of her approach,
did she leap back as if she had touched an electric wire. Then she
froze--flat. The wasp was lying curled up, as we have said, upon her
side, her head tucked in, her wings drawn down, her jaws tight shut
upon a splinter of wood. She had been there half-a-year, asleep,
hibernating, and in that state, without any other protection than the
summer-house roof and walls, had survived the frosts of winter.

The wasp did not move further.

The spider appeared to be taking things in, measuring her chances,
weighing the risk against her famished hunger--possibly her late
husband had been her last meal, months ago--marking the vital spot upon
her prey, aiming for the shot, which must be true, for one does not
miss in attacking a wasp--and live. Only, she would not have risked it
at all, perhaps, if the wasp had seemed alive, or more alive, at any
rate.

Then came the shot--one cannot in justice call it a spring; it was too
instant to be termed that. The spider simply was upon the wasp without
seeming to go there; but the wasp was not there, or, rather, her vital
spot wasn't. She had kicked herself round on her side, like a
cart-wheel, lying flat, with her feet, and the spider's jaws struck
only hard cuirass. Before the spider, leaping back, wolf-like, could
lunge in her lightning second stroke, the wasp was on her feet, a live
thing, after all.

The warmth had been already soaking the message of spring into her
cold-drugged brain, and now this sudden attack had finished what the
warmth had begun. She was awake, on her feet, a live and dangerous
proposition; groggy, it is true; dazed, half-working, so to speak; but
a force to be reckoned with--after half-a-year. And one saw, too, at a
glance that she was different from ordinary wasps--would make two, in
fact, of any ordinary wasp; and her great jaws looked as if they could
eat one and comfortably deal with more; whilst her dagger-sting, now
unsheathed and ready--probably for the first time--could de