“It’s the fourth time,” said McCurdie.  “The first time was just before I accepted the Deverills’ invitation.  The second in the railway carriage this afternoon.  The third on the way here.  This is the fourth.”

Biggleswade plucked nervously at the fringe of whisker under his jaws and said faintly, “It’s the fourth time up to now.  I thought it was fancy.”

“I have felt it, too,” said Doyne.  “It is the Angel of Death.”  And he pointed to the room where the dead man and woman lay.

“For God’s sake let us get away from this,” cried Biggleswade.

“And leave the child to die, like the others?” said Doyne.

“We must 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.]