“How does it begin?” asked Hugh.
“Oh, you silly! ‘Sleep, baby, sleep.’ Though I’m not a baby.”
Mrs. Allbutt could not help it: she deliberately spied. There was a big chink in the hinge of the nursery door, and she looked through. Hugh was lying with his black head on the pillow, close to Daisy’s, but, as she had said, the bed was not big enough, and one foot was on the floor and the other leg thrown over it. Jim had not been awakened, it appeared, by Daisy’s deviltry, and the little yellow head on the pillow of his bed was sunk in sleep. Daisy had dropped the grenadier attitude and was lying down in her bed; her two pale little hands grasped one of Hugh’s.
“Just the last verse, then,” said Hugh—“‘Sleep, baby, sleep!’”
“Yes.”
Hugh turned a little, so that he could sing with the open throat, but softly. And he sang—
Sleep, baby, sleep,
Our Saviour watch doth keep:
He is the Lamb of God on high,
Who for our sake came down to die;
Sleep, baby, sleep.
The tune was exquisite and simple, simple and exquisite were the words. And Hugh sang, as the artist always sings, as if this particular song was the one that he had longed and lived to sing. There was the same perfection as he had shown downstairs, and there was no more perfection possible.
“And now you’ll go to sleep, Sitonim?” he said.
“I couldn’t help it,” said Daisy.