But having entered with so fearless a front, the little woman drew up
suddenly at sight of the boy, and, entrenching herself behind the
doctor, began to swing by his coat-tails, and to take furtive glances at
the stranger in silence and aloofness.
"Bless their hearts! what funny things they are, to be sure," said the
mother. "Somebody seems to have been telling her she might have a
brother some day, and when nurse said to Susanna, 'The doctor has
brought a boy home with him to-night,' nothing was so sure as that this
was the brother they had promised her, and yet now ... Roma, you silly
child, why don't you come and speak to the poor boy who was nearly
frozen to death in the snow?"
But Roma's privateering fingers were now deep in her father's pocket, in
search of a specimen of the sugar-stick which seemed to live and grow
there. She found two sugar-sticks this time, and sight of a second
suggested a bold adventure. Sidling up toward the couch, but still
holding on to the doctor's coat-tails, like a craft that swings to
anchor, she tossed one of the sugar-sticks on to the floor at the boy's
side. The boy smiled and picked it up, and this being taken for
sufficient masculine response, the little daughter of Eve proceeded to
proper overtures.
"Oo a boy?"
The boy smiled again and assented.
"Oo me brodder?"
The boy's smile paled perceptibly.
"Oo lub me?"
The tide in the boy's eyes was rising rapidly.
"Oo lub me eber and eber?"
The tears were gathering fast, when the doctor, smoothing the boy's dark
curls again, said: "You have a little sister of your own far away in the Campagna
Romana--yes?"
"No, sir."
"Perhaps it's a brother?"
"I ... I have nobody," said the boy, and his voice broke on the last
word with a thud.
"You shall not go to the institution at all, David," said the doctor
softly.
"Doctor Roselli!" exclaimed his wife. But something in the doctor's face
smote her instantly and she said no more.
"Time for bed, baby."
But baby had many excuses. There were the sugar-sticks, and the pussy,
and the boy-brother, and finally her prayers to say.
"Say them here, then, sweetheart," said her mother, and with her cat
pinned up again under one arm and the sugar-stick held under the other,
kneeling face to the fire, but screwing her half-closed eyes at
intervals in the direction of the couch, the little maid put her little
waif-and-stray hands together and said: "Our Fader oo art in Heben, alud be dy name. Dy kingum tum. Dy will be
done on eard as it is in Heben. Gib us dis day our dayey bread, and
forgib us our trelspasses as we forgib dem dat trelspass ayenst us. And
lee us not into temstashuns, but deliber us from ebil ... for eber and
eber. Amen."