“What is a baby!” he said audaciously repeating God’s words.  “It is a little Man and a little God.  Surely, Thou knowest?”

“I know nothing,” God thundered, letting fall His hands from before His face.  “Be gone.”

When the hurricane of sound had ended, the robin found himself hovering in the gateway between the jasper walls, where the sheer drop which lies between earth and Heaven commences.  He turned to look back before he took the leap and saw that behind him the angels were following.  Following most closely was the Virgin.

“Tell me again,” she pleaded.  “It’s little and soft.  It’s cuddly and it smells like the flowers that bloom in Eden.”

Perched on her shoulder, with his beak against her ear, he twittered to her his tale once more.  While he was telling her, the angels crowded round, smoothing his feathers with shy caresses.  But he didn’t dare to stay too long, for distantly from beneath the mulberry tree, he still felt the brooding eyes of God.  Launching himself from the Virgin’s shoulder, he sank between the burning stars and through the bitter coldness of clouds snow-laden, till late in the wintry afternoon he reached the cave on the limestone ridge, whence a murmur of secret singing was emerging.

X

On the threshold he paused to listen.  Yes, it was the Woman.  It was the first time she had been happy enough to sing since she had been cast out of Eden.  But her song was entirely different from anything that she had sung before.  It was more little and tender.  It was a lullaby of mother-nonsense, which she hummed when she couldn’t find the proper rhymes and made up as she went along.

As the robin fluttered through the gloom to her shoulder, she pressed her finger to her lips to warn him.  The baby eyes were the merest slits of blueness.  The little thumb was in the mouth and the baby lips were sucking hard.  The tiny knees were digging into the Woman’s body and the baldy head was cushioned on her bosom.  The dog snoozed across her feet.  The Man crouched against her, shrouded in the mantle of her hair, overcome with weariness.  She was mothering them all, rocking herself slowly and singing gently her silly little song.  The crooning of it over and over seemed to hush them with a sense of security.

  “You are my ownty,
  Dear little donty,
  Sweetest and wonty,
  Pudding and pie;
  Good little laddie,
  Just like your daddie. 
  Fallen from Heaven,
  Come from the sky.”

“But he didn’t,” whispered the robin.

The Woman paused in her singing.  “Didn’t what?”

“He didn’t fall from Heaven.  God’s just been telling me; He never heard about him.”

The Woman smiled.  “Never heard about him!  It doesn’t matter; his Mummy’s heard about him.”  She stooped to kiss the soft little bundle, for he had commenced to stir.  Then she resumed her singing.