One day after he had been playing to her, and they were having tea together, he suddenly looked up at a picture of St. Michael that hung in her drawing-room.
“Queer,” he said, with a little twisted smile, “that my people should have chosen to name me after the warrior angel.” And he glanced from the strength of the pictured figure at his own shrunken limbs. His voice was so bitter that Sara could find no reply.
“Just a moment’s carelessness on the part of a nursemaid,” went on Michael. “She dropped me when I was a baby. You see the result. It makes it difficult to believe in an over-ruling Providence, doesn’t it? My guardian angel must have been peculiarly inattentive at the moment.”
“I think,” said Sara slowly, “that there are times in the life of every one when it is very difficult to have faith. Yet, if one loses it one loses all happiness.”
“I lost both long ago,” said Michael. “It’s an irony of fate to be born with an acute sense of the beautiful, and to see one’s own repulsiveness.”
Sara looked up quickly.
“But you are not repulsive,” she said.
“Bah!” said Michael. “Look at me! Women are only kind to me out of pity.”
Sara looked straight at him. “There you are quite wrong,” she said decisively. “I don’t feel the smallest pity for you in the sense you mean. Your face is quite beautiful, and your music——” she stopped.
“But my body,” he said.