The house in Soho Square was perfectly silent an hour afterward. In the

surgery the lamp was turned down, the cat was winking and yawning at the

fire, and the doctor sat in a chair in front of the fading glow and

listened to the measured breathing of the boy behind him. It dropped at

length, like a pendulum that is about to stop, into the noiseless beat

of innocent sleep, and then the good man got up and looked down at the

little head on the pillow.

Even with the eyes closed it was a beautiful face; one of the type which

great painters have loved to paint for their saints and angels--sweet,

soft, wise, and wistful. And where did it come from? From the Campagna

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Romana, a scene of poverty, of squalor, of fever, and of death!

The doctor thought of his own little daughter, whose life had been a

long holiday, and then of the boy whose days had been an unbroken

bondage.

"Yet who knows but in the rough chance of life our little Roma may not

some day ... God forbid!"

The boy moved in his sleep and laughed the laugh of a dream that is like

the sound of a breeze in soft summer grass, and it broke the thread of

painful reverie.

"Poor little man! he has forgotten all his troubles."

Perhaps he was back in his sunny Italy by this time, among the vines and

the oranges and the flowers, running barefoot with other children on the

dazzling whiteness of the roads!... Perhaps his mother in heaven was

praying her heart out to the Blessed Virgin to watch over her fatherless

darling cast adrift upon the world!

The train of thought was interrupted by voices in the street, and the

doctor drew the curtain of the window aside and looked out. The snow had

ceased to fall, and the moon was shining; the leafless trees were

casting their delicate black shadows on the whitened ground, and the

yellow light of a lantern on the opposite angle of the square showed

where a group of lads were singing a Christmas carol.

"While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground,

The angel of the Lord came down, and glory shone around."

Doctor Roselli closed the curtain, put out the lamp, touched with his

lips the forehead of the sleeping boy, and went to be




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