"Well," he said. "Have you nothing to tell me of your prince?"
"You know him," answered the man who had spoken from the safe
background. "We need not tell you."
"Yes," answered Paul; "I know him."
He would not defend himself.
"There," he went on, addressing the man whose hand was now bandaged.
"You will do. Keep clean and sober, and it will heal. Get drunk and go
dirty, and you will die. Do you understand, Ivan Ivanovitch?"
The man grunted sullenly, and moved away to give place to a woman with a
baby in her arms.
Paul glanced into her face. He had known her a few years earlier a happy
child playing at her mother's cottage door.
She drew back the shawl that covered her child, with a faint, far-off
gleam of pride in her eyes. There was something horribly pathetic in the
whole picture. 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. 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.
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