"Good-morning." With one droll look of amusement, the girl had
understood, and regained that grave yet happy, friendly composure which
had the virtue, he discovered, of being easily forgotten, to be met each
time like something new. "What have you there for us?"
Again he unfolded the jacket.
"A child."
The naked mite lay very still, the breath weakly fluttered. A somewhat
nauseous gift, the girl raised her arms and received it gently, without
haste,--the saffron body appearing yet more squalid against the
Palladian whiteness of her tunic, plain and cool as drapery in marble.
"It may live," she said. "We'll do what we can." And followed by the
black-trousered woman, she moved quickly away to offer battle with
death. A plain, usual fact, it seemed, involving no more surprise than
repugnance. Her face had hardly altered; and yet Rudolph, for the first
time in many days, had caught the fleeting brightness of compassion.
Mere light of the eyes, a half-imagined glory, incongruous in the sharp
smell of antiseptics, it left him wondering in the cloister. He knew now
what had been missing by the river.
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