absorbing, passionate love. A girl of seventeen, just between child and
woman, who seemed to have been a baby but yesterday, and who still, in
the midst of her new womanly grace, kept her caressing baby ways.
Something unusual, not only in degree but in kind, belonged to her
brilliant beauty, and set it off. The marvellous blackness of hair and
eyes was so soft in its depth, the tint of her skin so transparent in
its duskiness, her slight figure so flexible, so exquisite in its
outlines, that it was impossible not to wonder what the type was which
produced so perfect an example. Spanish it was said to be, but the child
was Canadian by birth, and her mother English; it was clear that
whatever race had bestowed Lucia's dower of beauty, it had come to her
through her father.

Mother and daughter often sat as now, silent and idle both; Lucia
dreaming after her girlish fashion, and Mrs. Costello content to wait
and let her life be absorbed in her child's. But to-night Lucia was
dreaming of England, the far-away "home" which she had never seen, but
of which almost all her elder friends spoke, and where her mother's
childhood and girlhood had been passed. She still leaned her head back
lazily as she began to talk.

"Are English sunsets as lovely as ours, Mamma?"

Mrs. Costello smiled. "I can't tell," she said; "they are as lovely to
me,--but I only see them in memory."

"You have often talked about going home, when shall it be?"

"I have talked of _your_ going, not of mine--_that_ will never be."