to
enter the room. I went in.

There, at the opposite end of a miserably furnished bed-chamber,
lying back feebly in a tattered old arm-chair, was one more among the
thousands of forlorn creatures, starving that night in the great city.
A white handkerchief was laid over her face as if to screen it from the
flame of the fire hard by. She lifted the handkerchief, startled by the
sound of my footsteps as I entered the room. I looked at her, and saw in
the white, wan, death-like face the face of the woman I loved!

For a moment the horror of the discovery turned me faint and giddy. In
another instant I was kneeling by her chair. My arm was round her--her
head lay on my shoulder. She was past speaking, past crying out: she
trembled silently, and that was all. I said nothing. No words passed my
lips, no tears came to my relief. I held her to me; and she let me hold
her. The child, devouring its bread-and-butter at a little round table,
stared at us. The boy, on his knees before the grate, mending the fire,
stared at us. And the slow minutes lagged on; and the buzzing of a fly
in a corner was the only sound in the room.

The instincts of the profession to which I had been trained, rather than
any active sense of the horror of the situation in which I was placed,
roused me at last. She was starving! I saw it in the deadly color of her
skin; I felt it in the faint, quick flutter of her pulse. I called
the boy to me, and sent him to the nearest public-house for wine and
biscuits. "Be quick about it," I said; "and you shall have more money
for yourself than ever you had in your life!" The boy looked at me, spit
on the coins in his hand, said, "That's for luck!" and ran out of the
room as never boy ran yet.

I turned to speak my first words of comfort to the mother. The cry of
the child stopped me.

"I'm so hungry! I'm so hungry!"

I set more food before the famished child and kissed her. She looked up
at me with wondering eyes.

"Are you a new papa?" the little creature asked. "My other papa never
kisses me."

I looked at the mother. Her eyes were closed; the tears flowed slowly
over her worn, white cheeks. I took her frail hand in mine. "Happier
days are coming," I said; "you are _my_ care now." There was no answer.
She still trembled silently, and that was all.

In less than five minutes the boy returned, and earned his promised
reward. He sat on the floor by the fire counting his treasure, the one
happy creature in