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This great, big, hardened creature then gave the greatest trouble, would have me remove my patient out of her room, even at the risk of her life, and I was obliged to call the assistance of the policeman to have her quieted. After a while all was quiet except the feeble cry of a little girl who had been born. Born in a house of vice, what will became of it and its child-mother?
Paul nodded and drew aside the shawl. The baby was staring at him with wise, grave eyes, as if it could have told him a thing or two if it had only been gifted with the necessary speech. Paul knew that look. It meant starvation. "What is it?" asked the child-mother. "It is only some little illness, is it not?" "Yes; it is only a little illness."
Why, if it were only to stop these early marriages if only for the sake of the poor child-mother and the unborn children doomed, if they see the light, to life-long misery one would shower upon the Palace all the money that is asked to complete it.
The girl had not the development of a woman, although she had menstruated regularly since her fifth year. The labor was short and uneventful, and, two hours afterward, the child-mother wanted to arise and dress and would have done so had she been permitted. There were no developments of the mammae nor secretion of milk.
The child-mother, her rough, unlovely face lighted for a moment with that gleam from Paradise which men never know; the huge man bending over her, and between them the wizened, disease-stricken little waif of humanity. "When he was born he was a very fine child," said the mother. Paul glanced at her. She was quite serious. She was looking at him with a strange pride on her face.
"The silence which she knew was more acceptable sympathy to the tearless child-woman than words would have been, was only broken when they were standing on the steps above the creek. Then the words were interrupted by the child-mother.
It had been impossible for the spectators from the body of the church to follow closely the movements of the twelve white-robed maidens with their attendant swains while the ceremony was progressing in the dim recesses of the choir, and the surprise and dishonor this unexpected dénouement brought upon the home were nothing to the unhappiness in store for the childish bride, whose latest and wildest freak brought neither wisdom for self-discipline nor power to endure that relentless criticism which ceased only when a little one lay in the place of the child-mother, who had been too weak to cope with the worries of the year that had followed upon that unhappy day in San Pietro.
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