'Who would look after poor baby if I were taken away?' she asked, and shaking with cold, was about to crawl into bed; but on laying her knee on the bedside she remembered that a little spirit often saved a human life; and going to the chest of drawers took out the bottle she had hidden from Dick and filled a glass. The spirit diffused a grateful warmth through her, and she drank a second glass slowly, thinking of her child and husband, and how good she intended to be to both of them, until ideas became broken, and she tumbled into bed, awaking Dick, who was soon asleep again, with Kate by his side watching a rim of light rising above a dark chimney stack and wondering what new shows must be preparing. Already the rim of light had become a crescent, and before her eyes closed in sleep the full moon looked down through the window into the cradle, waking the sleeping child. But her cries were too weak; her mother lay in sleep beyond reach of her wails, heart-breaking though they were. The little blankets were cast aside, and the struggle between life and death began: soft roundnesses fell into distortions; chubby knees were wrenched to and fro, muscles seemed to be torn, and a few minutes later little Kate, who had known of this world but a ray of moonlight, died--a glimpse of the moon was all that had been granted to her. After watching for an hour or more, the moon moved up the skies; and in Kate's dream the moon was the great yellow witch in the pantomime, who, before striding her broomstick, cries back: 'Thou art mine only, for ever and for ever!' XXIV The passing of a funeral in our English streets is so common a sight that hearses and plumes and mutes and carriages filled with relatives garbed in crape have almost ceased to remind us that our dust too is on the way to the graveyard; and it is not until we catch sight of a man walking in the carriage way carrying a brown box under his arm that we start like someone suddenly stung and remember the mystery of life and death. Even Dick remembered it, and wondered as he plodded after little Kate's coffin why it was that she should have been called out of the void and called back into the void so quickly. 'Whether our term be but a month or ninety years, life and death beckon us but once,' he said, and he fell to envying Kate her tears, tears seeming to him more comforting than thoughts, and he would gladly have shed a few to help the journey away: not a long one, however, for the Lennoxes lived in an unfrequented part of the town by the cemetery. 'We shall soon be there,' he whispered, and Kate, raising her weeping face, looked round. All the shops were filled with funeral emblems, wreaths of everlasting flowers, headstones with dates in indelible ink, crosses of consolation, and kneeling angels. 'If we only had money,' Kate cried, 'to buy a monument to put on her grave,' and she called upon Dick to admire a kneeling angel.