The wind sobbed with him. Outside the window it wailed in eerie lamentation. It dashed a near-by shrub, a ragged rosetree that Seth had planted, against the window. The twigs tapped at the pane like human fingers.
"There, there!" soothed Cyclona, and she changed the baby's position, so that his little body curled warmly about her and his face was upturned to hers to coax him into the belief that she was Celia.
Once more she drifted into the lullaby, crooning it very softly in her lilting young voice:
"Sleep, baby, sleep.
The big stars are the sheep,
The little stars are the lambs, I guess,
The moon is the shepherdess,
Sleep,
Baby,
Sleep."
But the wind seemed to oppose her efforts at soothing the child whose startled eyes stared at the window against which tapped the attenuated fingers of the twigs. The wind shrieked at him. His sobs turned into cries.
Cyclona got up and going to the bed laid him on it, talking cooing baby talk to him. She prepared his food. She warmed the milk and crumbled bread into it.
Taking him up again, she fed it to him spoonful by spoonful, awkwardly, yet in a motherly way.
Then she patted him on her shoulder, and tried to rock him to sleep, singing, patting him on the back cooingly when the howl of the wind startled him out of momentary slumber.
The wind appeared to be extraordinarily perverse. It was almost as if, knowing this was Celia's child, that Celia whose hatred it had felt from the first, it took pleasure in punctuating his attempt to sleep with shrieks and wailings, with piercing and unearthly cries.
Once it tossed a tumbleweed at the window. The great round human-like head looked in and the child, opening his eyes upon it, broke into piteous moaning.