He squeezed her hand. She let it lie motionless in his.

“But if it weren’t a boy?” he said, struck by a sudden reaction of doubt.

And the thought went, like an arrow, through him:

“What chance should I have then?”

“I know it will be a boy,” she answered.

“Why? Not because you sleep north and south!” he exclaimed, with a laughing allusion to the assertion of Herrick.

“I don’t.”

“I always thought the bed——”

“No, it’s east and west.”

“Fishermen say the dead sleep east and west.”