It was the transformation that came over them whenever any one was visibly poor, or starving, or sorrowing, or hurt,--the change which a beautiful passion brings to the ugliest face in the world.
Bosio smiled faintly as he saw it, and a little hope was breathed into his heart, as though somewhere, at some immeasurable distance, there might be a possibility of salvation from the ruin and wreck of his horrible life.
"Yes," he said.

"I am suffering.

It is a great suffering.

I do not think that I can live much longer." "Can I do nothing ?" asked Don Teodoro.
Bosio still smiled, as a man smiles in torture when one speaks to him of peace.
"If I believed that anything could be done," he said, "I should not suffer as I do.

I have lived a bad life, and the time has come when I must pay the score.