Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/14

Rh had left it to come to London, there to expend her wealth and her compassion wherever she found need for it.

Her way this morning lay through Trafalgar-square. As she reached the National Gallery, some strong impulse made her turn and enter. She used to say afterwards that an angel must have taken her by the hand and led her in. The galleries seemed to be quite empty. She walked slowly from one room to another, stopping now and then to glance at a picture, but always drawn irresistibly on again.

Suddenly a child's terrified scream, breaking the stillness of the place, startled her. She hastened in the direction from which the sound had come, and was soon on the spot where Ralphie lay unconscious on the floor, Nellie crouched beside him.

"My poor little ones!" cried Olivia Ross, and in a moment she was lifting the prostrate child into her pitying arms.

Ralphie stirred and opened his eyes.

What a radiant smile it was that stole into his face as he looked up at the lady in whose arms he lay! It was as if some celestial vision had been granted him.

"You have woke up at last!" he whispered. "Woke up at last!" There was a cadence of perfect content in the feeble little voice, and for a moment the blue eyes shone out from the pallor of the child's face with a wonderful lustre and beauty.

Olivia started. It was not Ralphie's words, but his beautiful eyes, that awoke a strange agitation within her.

"How like! How like!" she exclaimed wonderingly to herself, as she scanned the lines of Ralphie's face.

But this was no time for wonder and wild speculation. The exhausted condition of the little fellow demanded immediate relief. Learning from Nellie, who clung sobbing to her skirts, that the children's home was farther away than her own, she did not pause long to consider what she should do. Nellie was sent home to tell the story to her mother, and in a brief time Ralphie was under Olivia Ross's roof with a doctor beside him.

Ralphie was very ill, said the doctor, but with extreme care there was hope of his recovery.

He had always kept but a frail hold of life, and now he had a hard struggle not to let go of it altogether. He lay in a state of semi-consciousness. Now and then he opened his eyes, and always that seraphic smile came into them when he saw the pitiful face of Olivia Ross bending over him. And Olivia smiled back at him, because she saw that it satisfied the child, but her heart was full of tears, and she yearned strangely towards him.

When Mrs. Clarke came, and when Olivia heard the story of Ralphie's parents, her heart nearly broke with mingled joy and pain. There was no doubt that little