ter! But would Jan ever be better? Moll had no thought
now for either the butter or the rent. The yellow cream might turn
sour in every single one of her pans for all she cared, if only she
could get rid of this new unbearable pain.

At length, on the evening of the second day, faint with the want of
sleep, she fell into an uneasy doze: and still Jan had neither moved
nor stirred. Presently a faint sound woke her. Was he calling? No; it
was but the Christmas bells ringing across the snow. What were those
bells saying? 'MUR-DER-ER' 'MUR-DERER'--was that it? Over and over
again. Did even the bells know what she had done and what she had in
her heart? For a moment black despair seized her.

The next moment there followed the shuffling sound of many feet
padding through the snow. The storm had ceased by this time, and all
the world was wrapped in a white silence, broken only by the sound of
the distant bells. And now the Christmas waits had followed the bells'
music, and were singing carols outside the ale-house door. Fiercely,
Moll stuck her fingers in her ears. She would not listen, lest even
the waits should sing of her sin, and shew her the blackness of her
heart. But the song stole up into the room, and, in spite of herself,
something forced Moll to attend to the words:

'Babe Jesus lay in Mary's lap,
The sun shone on his hair--
And that was how she saw, mayhap,
The crown already there.'

That was how good mothers sang to their children. They saw crowns
upon their hair. What sort of a crown had Moll given to her child? She
looked across and saw the chaplet of white bandages lying on the white
pillow. No; she, Moll, had never been a good mother, would never be
one now, unless her boy came back to life again. She was a murderer,
and her husband when he returned from the wars would tell her so, and
little Jan would never know that his mother had a heart after all.

At that moment the carol died away, and the waits' feet, heavy with
clinging snow, shuffled off into the darkness; but looking down again
at the head with its crown of white bandages upon the white pillow,
Moll saw that this time Jan's eyes were open and shining up at her.

'Mother,' he said, in his little weak voice, as he opened his arms and
smiled. Moll had seen him smile like that at his father; she had never
known before that she wanted to share that smile. She knew it now.

Only three short days had passed since she turned the Stra