III

UNDER THE YELLOW FLAG

A little past noon each day the sun covered a crack between two boards
on the summer-house floor, and up through that aperture, for three
days, had come a leggy, racy-looking, wolfish black spider. Each day,
as it grew hotter, she extended her sphere of jerky investigation,
vanishing 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,