could escape from despair.

The unhappy man had begun to think of taking his own life. He had always
condemned suicide. He had even condemned it in Bruno. But it was the
death grip of a man utterly borne down, and there was nothing else to
hold on to.

The day began to break, and he turned back towards the piazza of St.
Peter's, thinking of what he intended to do and where he would do it. By
the end of the Hospital of Santo Spirito there was a little blind alley
bounded by a low wall. Below was the quick turn of the Tiber, and no
swimmer was strong enough to live long in the turbulent waters at that
point. He would do it there.

The streets were silent, and in the grey dawn, that mystic hour of
parturition when the day is being born and things are seen in places
where they do not exist, when ships sail in the sky and mountains rise
around lowland cities, David Rossi became aware in a moment that a woman
was walking on the pavement in front of him. He could almost have
believed that it was Roma, the figure was so tall and full and upright.
But the woman's dress was poorer, and she was carrying a bundle in her
arms. When he looked again he saw that her bundle was a child, and that
she was weeping over it.

"Taking her little one to the hospital," he thought.

But on turning into the little Borgo he saw that the woman went up to
the Rota, knelt before it, kissed the child again and again, put it in
the cradle, pulled the bell, and then, crying bitterly, hastened away.

Rossi remembered his own mother, and a great tide of simple human
tenderness swept over him. What he had seen the woman do was what his
mother had done thirty-five years before. He saw it all as by a mystic
flash of light, which looked back into the past.

Suddenly it occurred to him that the Rota had been long since closed,
and therefore it was physically impossible that anybody could have put a
child into the cradle. Then he remembered that he had not heard the
bell, or the woman's footsteps, or the sound of her voice when she wept.

He stopped and looked back. The woman was returning in the direction of
the piazza of St. Peter's. By an impulse which he could not resist he
followed her, overtook her, and looked into her face.

Again he thought he was looking at Roma. There was the same nobility in
the beautiful features, the same sweetness in the tremulous mouth, the
same grandeur in the great dark eyes. But he knew perfectly who it was.
It was