Edith had a place near the reading-desk where she could see the countenances of all those children who were sitting side by side in row after row and filling every seat in the room, a restless, eager, expectant crowd, half disciplined and only held quiet by the order and authority they had learned to respect.  Such faces as she looked into!  In scarcely a single one could she find anything of true childhood, and they were so marred by suffering and evil!  In vain she turned from one to another, searching for a sweet, happy look or a face unmarked by pain or vice or passion.  It made her heart ache.  Some were so hard and brutal in their expression, and so mature in their aspect, that they seemed like the faces of debased men on which a score of years, passed in sensuality and crime, had cut their deep deforming lines, while others were pale and wasted, with half-scared yet defiant eyes, and thin, sharp, enduring lips, making one tearful to look at them.  Some were restless as caged animals, not still for a single instant, hands moving nervously and bodies swaying to and fro, while others sat stolid and almost as immovable as stone, staring at the little group of men and women in front who were to lead them in the exercises of the morning.

At length one face of the many before her fixed the eyes of Edith.  It was the face of a little boy scarcely more than three years old.  He was only a few benches from her, and had been hidden from view by a larger boy just in front of him.  When Edith first noticed this child, he was looking at her intently from a pair of large, clear brown eyes that had in them a wistful, hungry expression.  His hair, thick and wavy, had been smoothly brushed by some careful hand, and fell back from a large forehead, the whiteness and smoothness of which was noticeable in contrast with those around him.  His clothes were clean and good.

As Edith turned again and again to the face of this child, the youngest perhaps in the room, her heart began to move toward him.  Always she found him with his great earnest eyes upon her.  There seemed at last to be a mutual fascination.  His eyes seemed never to move from her face; and when she tried to look away and get interested in other faces, almost unconsciously to herself her eyes would wander back, and she would find herself gazing at the child.

At eleven o’clock Mr. Paulding announced that the exercises for the morning would begin, when silence fell on the restless company of undisciplined children.  A hymn was read, and then, as the leader struck the tune, out leaped the voices of these four hundred children, each singing with a strange wild abandon, many of them swaying their heads and bodies in time to the measure.  As the first lines of the hymn,

“Jesus, gentle Shepherd, lead us,
Much we need thy tender care,”

swelled up from the lips of those poor neglected children, the eyes of Edith grew blind with tears.