I felt sorry for him.  Armida had been a good servant, and had served me well for nearly three years.  Old Rosina, my housekeeper, had often regretted that she had been compelled to leave to attend to her aged mother.  The latter, he told me, had died, and afterwards he had married her.  There is more romance and tragedy in the lives of the poor Italians in London than London ever suspects.  We are too apt to regard the Italian as a bloodthirsty person given to the unlawful use of the knife, whereas, as a whole, the Italian colony in London is a hard-working, thrifty, and law-abiding one, very different, indeed, to those colonies of aliens from Northern Europe, who are so continually bringing filth, disease, and immorality into the East End, and are a useless incubus in an already over-populated city.

He spoke so wistfully that his wife might see me once more that, having nothing very particular to do that evening, and feeling a deep sympathy for the poor fellow in his trouble, I resolved to accompany him to his house and see whether I could not, in some slight manner, render him a little help.

He thanked me profusely when I consented to go with him.

“Ah, signor padrone!” he said gratefully, “she will be so delighted.  It is so very good of you.”

We hailed a hansom and drove across Westminster Bridge to the address he gave—­a gloomy back street off the York Road, one of those narrow, grimy thoroughfares into which the sun never shines.  Ah, how often do the poor Italians, those children of the sun, pine and die when shut up in our dismal, sordid streets!  Dirt and squalor do not affect them; it is the damp and cold and lack of sunshine that so very soon proves fatal.

A low-looking, evil-faced fellow opened the door to us and growled acquaintance with Olinto, who, striking a match, ascended the worn, carpetless stairs before me, apologizing for passing before me, and saying in Italian—­

“We live at the top, signore, because it is cheaper and the air is better.”

“Quite right,” I said.  “Quite right.  Go on.”  And I thought I heard my cab driving away.

It was a gloomy, forbidding, unlighted place into which I would certainly have hesitated to enter had not my companion been my trusted servant.  I instinctively disliked the look of the fellow who had opened the door.  He was one of those hulking loafers of the peculiarly Lambeth type.  Yet the alien poor, I recollected, cannot choose where they shall reside.

Contrary to my expectations, the sitting-room we entered on the top floor was quite comfortably furnished, clean and respectable, even though traces of poverty were apparent.  A cheap lamp was burning upon the table, but the apartment was unoccupied.

Olinto, in surprise, passed into the adjoining room, returning a moment later, exclaiming—­

“Armida must have gone out to get something.  Or perhaps she is with the people, a compositor and his wife, who live on the floor below.  They are very good to her.  I’ll go and find her.  Accommodate yourself with a chair, signore.”  And he drew the best chair forward for me, and dusted it with his handkerchief.