"Did you love him, dear?" she asked softly.

"We were children then," Aurora answered. "How do I know? I shall know
when he comes back."

It was true that the girl had changed within a few weeks, and her mother
saw it. Her smile was not the same, and her eyes were deeper. She had
begun to gather her hair in a knot, closer to her head, and that altered
her expression a little and made her look much older; but there was more
than that, there was something very hard to describe, something one
might call conviction--the conviction that the world is real, which
comes upon girlhood as suddenly as waking on sleep, or sleep on waking.
She had crossed the narrow borderland between play and earnest, and she
had crossed it very soon.

"He will come back," she said. "He went away on that little ship that
was tossing in the storm. I know it, though I cannot tell how he got out
to it through the breaking waves."

"That is perfectly impossible, child," said Maddalena with certainty.

"Never mind. If we knew what ship that was, and where she is now, we
could find Marcello. I am as sure of it as I am sure of seeing you at
this moment. You know you often say that my presentiments come true. As
soon as we knew he was gone I thought of the little ship."

It was natural, perhaps. The picture of the small brigantine, fighting
for existence, had graved itself in her memory. With its crew so near
death, it had been the only thing within sight that suggested human life
after Marcello was gone. The utter impossibility of a man's swimming out