ceaselessly quivered and contracted, it kept bawling: "A-aah!
A-a-ah!"

Moreover, so slippery was it that, as I knelt and looked at it
and laughed with relief at the fact that it had arrived safely,
I came near to letting it fall upon the ground: wherefore I
entirely forgot what next I ought to have done.

"Cut it!" at length whispered the mother with eyes closed, and
features suddenly swollen and resembling those of a corpse.

"A knife!" again she whispered with her livid lips. "Cut it!"

My pocket-knife I had had stolen from me in the workmen's
barraque; but with my teeth I severed the caul, and then the
child gave renewed tongue in true Orlovian fashion, while the
mother smiled. Also, in some curious fashion, the mother's
unfathomable eyes regained their colour, and became filled as
with blue fire as, plunging a hand into her bodice and feeling
for the pocket, she contrived to articulate with raw and
blood-flecked lips:

"I have not a single piece of string or riband to bind the caul
with."

Upon that I set to, and managed to produce a piece of riband,
and to fasten it in the required position.

Thereafter she smiled more brightly than ever. So radiantly did
she smile that my eyes came near to being blinded with the