a song that was all feeling and beauty, and the cries of the children as they clapped, and then Anita's voice as she began to speak quietly and reverently. I lit a cigarette, and my palms were wet with tears. Then Anita came, and it seemed to me that her dress was whiter still and that it shed light... and I touched her with reverence, as though the Virgin Lady had appeared to me on Christmas night. But Anita was not conscious of her own grandeur, and she said with her accustomed simplicity:

"'Emotion has taken hold of you... I saw it... We are so very happy that we feel we do not deserve it!'

"Then we embraced, and behold, she was weeping. The sight of the sky with its crowding stars was a sight to madden, and I felt within me a spiritual strength, and it seemed to me that I could lift the house upon my arms!!"

He fell silent, and the doctor rose and walked toward the window. The sick man said in a broken voice:

"A man speaks of these things as though he were living them over again. I see that I have wearied the Doctor. Shall I pass over these events, or tell everything?"

The doctor answered him:

"Tell all that memory keeps, be it good or bad."

But he did not tell the sick man that at that hour he was not the doctor of nervous diseases alone. He did not say that there was that age-old curiosity — "Man" bent over the misery and the happiness of mankind, analysis flashing in the eye, the one same flash in every case.

The doctor returned to his chair, and the sick man's hands went back to trembling and twitching, so the doctor closed his eyes to calm his fright. And the man began, and went on telling how everything had happened according to plan, how the installments were paid on time and Anita's machine rattled until a late hour of the night, and all of life was contentment and serenity — until there came a day when the son, Carlos, was stricken with pneumonia:

"We called in a doctor, and when he entered our house, care entered with him. This doctor was not a wicked man; he was like all the people who come to earn by their work, and that is a right. The mason earns by laying stones and the engineer by building bridges, and everyone moves by the motive of interest. People understand that this is right and just. And yet I cannot picture that doctor bent over my boy's bed without thinking of the crow."

And the doctor smiles, and reflects that he himself is a strange white crow, listening with eagerness to the tale of this poor sick man — the tale of the misery of this unknown "Man," cut off from everything around him except his memories.

"And my boy lost his health. He escaped the

pneumonia, but he became like a threadbare rag... his color yellowed, his eyes sank, his bones showed. Down poured the prescriptions and the injections, the pictures taken by the unknown rays, and the sputum tests in the laboratories. And one day the doctor said to me in a natural tone, as though he were talking of the weather:

"'Senhor Armando, your son has tuberculosis of the lungs!'

"I took him to the sanatorium in the city of Saint Joseph, paid a month's fees, commended him to the doctor and the nurses, and came back consoling myself that his cure would be the best recompense for every financial sacrifice.

"As for Anita, from that day she changed. She worked bravely, night and day, her back bent over the sewing machine. And I went looking for extra work at night to meet my debts, which had piled up because of the expenses of the hospital and the medicines.

"Sometimes I would lie down tired and not sleep for much thinking, and I would notice that my wife was not sleeping either; but we would not breathe a word, believing that talk only adds to our pains. Our silence was like a sheet spread over our calamity, so that we should not see it whole. There was a kind of agreement between us, and we never once spoke of the boy. Two months after he entered the sanatorium, Anita went to visit him and came back with reddened eyes and went up to her room without tasting food. I followed her. She was lying in the dark, weeping quietly. I said nothing, but took her hand in mine. Her skin was dry and rough, and I remembered the days of our engagement, when it was soft as velvet and I would touch it fearfully lest I hurt her. And I began to ask her forgiveness. Forgiveness for what? I do not know. But I asked her forgiveness because I felt myself in some way answerable for all this. She wept long, long, without complaint. She wept until I felt she was cutting my heart; and at last she spoke and said that the boy was improving, but the money must be found — there must be butter and fruit and eggs, in plenty.

"And one night my wife said:

"'Listen, Armando. The front room of the house is of little use to us. I can receive my customers in the dining room; and we, after all, are not people of luxury.'

"I agreed with her, and published an advertisement in a newspaper, and there came to us a dignified lodger, gentle of manner, light of presence, who ate at set hours and lost himself among his books. He stayed in our house three months, then went off to a town in the interior. His going was sudden, and we were in utmost need of the room's rent, so we were obliged to place a new advertisement in the papers.