ELISABETTA'S CHRISTMAS.
MANY years ago Elisabetta married. It must have been Elisabetta who married, ill-natured people said, because it was impossible to imagine the lover who chose her of free will. But, then, these people could not remember Elisabetta in her youth, with the sweet face, and clear, pale skin, lighted by those great brown eyes like tender moons—so pathetic and fair a face that the gaze lingered there and forgot to descend to the wry and dwarfed ungainliness of the hunch-backed body.
Perhaps it was fortunate for her that the husband, who could discern the beautiful intelligence looking through those eyes, died early, before the films of time obscured them. But Elisabetta never thought so; she was sure that he who once read that rede aright, would have been constant to the end, and she possessed her soul in patience until that hour when the flesh should shrivel away and leave her more lovely and more free than even his faith had held her. Her choicest day-dream was to picture him when he should see her as she was.
In the early years of her marriage Elisabetta had borne a son. He came to comfort her when her companion died. In her love she forgot her loss. It was his child, a portion of his spirit—himself, new-made and innocent, but all informed with her own life, her own nature. It was not that she lost remembrance of her dead husband in the child, but she and her husband had become so thoroughly one that, feeling his continued existence through every pore of her being, she loved the boy for both. She looked in his blue eyes till she could not see them for the tears of delight in her own. "Shure, he has his father's eyes in the head of him!" said Nora, henceforth her guardian and protector.
Almost in his infancy the little Sebastian manifested signs of an uncommon understanding. It might be that planetary brilliance which is destined to move in a life-long orbit and give light to generations, or it might merely be that surcharge of vitality which, spreading over the childhood of so many, deceives the heart with expectation—a rank growth like that of those splendid puff-balls, which, after all, contain only a pinch of dust. His mother, however, believed unfalteringly, as it is the way of mothers, that he was designed for extraordinary things, and bemoaned herself that out of her insufficient annuity she should never be able to rear him as he merited.
One day, when Sebastian was quite a lad, Elisabetta received a call from her husband's brother. She had little to complain of in
