sked her.

She caught his hands, she tried to bless him and to thank him, and broke
down in hysterical sobs.

"I took it--yes! What would you have? I took it for my mother. She is
old, and blind, and without food. It is for her that I came on the
streets; but she does not know it, it would kill her to know; she thinks
my money honest; and she is so proud and glad with it! That was the
first thing I _stole_! O God! are you an angel? If they had put me in
prison my mother would have starved!"

He looked on her gently, and with a pity that fell upon her heart like
balm.

"I saw it was your first theft. Hardened robbers do not wear your
stricken face," he said softly, as he slipped two coins into her hand.
"Ah, child! let your mother die rather than allow her to eat the bread
of your dishonour: which choice between the twain do you not think a
mother would make? And know your trade she must, soon or late. Sin no
more, were it only for that love you bear her."

* * *

Their lives had drifted asunder, as two boats drift north and south on a
river, the distance betwixt them growing longer and longer with each
beat of the oars and each sigh of the tide. And for the lives that part
thus, there is no reunion. One floats out to the open and sunlit sea;
and one passes away to the grave of the stream. Meet again on the river
they cannot.

* * *

"They shudder when they read of the Huns and the Ostrogoths pouring down
into Rome," he mused, as he passed toward the pandemonium. "They keep a
horde as savage, imprisoned in their midst, buried in the very core of
their capitals, side by side with their churches and palaces, and never
remember the earthquake that would whelm them if once the pent volcano
burst, if once the black mass covered below took flame and broke to the
surface! Statesmen multiply their prisons, and strengthen their laws
against the crime that is done--and they never take the canker out of
the bud, they never save the young child from pollution. Their political
economy never studies prevention; it never cleanses the sewers, it only
curses the fever-stricken!"

* * *

"What avail?" he thought. "What avail to strive to bring men nearer to
the right? They love their darkness best--why not leave them to it? Age
after age the few cast away their lives striving to raise and to ransom
the many. What use? Juvenal scourged Rome, and the same vices that his