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
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