This startled him!

And when he noticed how the woman, in whose lap the girl's head was
resting, bent over the injured bosom of the child to catch her breathing,
which she feared had come to a stand-still--with the anguish of a dove
that is struck down by a hawk--he remembered a moment in his own
childhood, when he had lain trembling with fever on his little bed.
What then had happened to him, or had gone on around him, he had long
forgotten, but one image was deeply imprinted on his soul, that of the
face of his mother bending over him in deadly anguish, but who had gazed
on her sick boy not more tenderly, or more anxiously, than this despised
woman on her suffering child.

"There is only one utterly unselfish, utterly pure and utterly divine
love," said he to himself, "and that is the love of Isis for Horus--the
love of a mother for her child. If these people were indeed so foul as
to defile every thing they touch, how would this pure, this tender, holy
impulse show itself even in them in all its beauty and perfection?"

"Still," he continued, "the Celestials have implanted maternal love in
the breast of the lioness, of the typhonic river-horse of the Nile."

He looked compassionately at the wife of the paraschites.

He saw her dark face as she turned it away from the sick girl. She had
felt her breathe, and a smile of happiness lighted up her old features;
she nodded first to the surgeon, and then with a deep sigh of relief to
her husband, who, while he did not cease the movement of his left hand,
held up his right hand in prayer to heaven, and his wife did the same.