onse, 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."

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