apostle he
must stand for. These anarchists were all doubters, and the chief of
doubters was the figure that would represent them.

David Rossi did not speak much at first, and he did not join in Roma's
nervous laughter. Sometimes he looked at her with a steadfast gaze,
which would have been disconcerting if it had not been so simple and
childlike. At length he looked out of the window to where the city lay
basking in the sunshine, and birds were swirling in the clear blue sky,
and began to talk of serious subjects.

"How beautiful!" he said. "No wonder the English and Americans who come
to Italy for health and the pleasure of art think it a paradise where
every one should be content. And yet...."

"Yes?"

"Under the smile of this God-blessed land there is suffering such as can
hardly be found in any other country of the world. Sometimes I think I
cannot bear it any longer, and must go away, as others do."

"A little more this way, please--thank you! That doesn't do much for
them, does it?"

"For them? No! God comfort the poor exiles--their path is a bridge of
sighs! Poor, friendless, forgotten, huddled together in some dingy
quarter of a foreign city, one a music-master, another a teacher of
languages, a third a supernumerary at a theatre, a fourth an organ-man
or even a beggar in the streets, yet weapons in the hand of God and
shaking the thrones of the world!"

"_You_ have seen something of that, haven't you?"

"I have."

"In London?"

"Yes. There's an old quarter on the fringe of the fashionable district.
It is called Soho. Densely populated, infested with vice, the very sewer
of the city, yet an asylum of liberty for all that. The refugees of
Europe fly to it. Its criminals, too, perhaps; for misery, like poverty,
has many bedfellows."

"You lived there?"

"Yes."

Roma was wiping her fingers with the sponge, and looking sideways out of
the window. "And your old friend, Doctor Roselli--he lived in Soho?"

"In Soho Square when I knew him first. The house faced to the north, and
had a porch and trees in front of it."

The sponge had dropped to the floor, but Roma did not observe it. She
took up a tooth-tool and began to work on the clay again.

"A little more that way, please--thanks! Do you think your friend had a
right to renounce his rank and to break up his family in Italy? Think of
his father--he would be broken-hearted."

"He was--I've heard my old friend say so. He cursed him at last and