her arms, and quickly casting aside her two garments laid her gently
in a bath of caressing warmth. A moment more and the little maiden lay
like a rose-leaf in her bed.

The night-lamp made shadowy ghosts of all it touched, and one gleam of
light, escaping the paper shade, hung like an aureole above the head
of Yuki Chan's mother as she knelt with clasped hands before the
Buddha on the shelf.

Her moving lips had only one refrain: "The child, the child, the
child."

Yuki Chan watched the play of the light in the half-dark room. What
funny things those shadows made, and, strangely enough, one more
wonderful than all the rest grew into the shape of the boy, and his
lips were saying, "Be good."

Then Yuki Chan lost herself in a mist of drowsiness, and her mother
sat by, and kept time with her hand as she chanted rather than sang:

"Sleep, little one, sleep.
The sparrows are nodding.
Beneath the deep willow-trees
The night-lamp is burning.
Thy mother is watching,
Sleep, little one, sleep."