"To-day I do."

"Why to-day?"

"Because I wish it so much. And it seems to me as if perhaps I wish it
because you once wished it for me. You thought I should be a boy?"

"I felt sure you would be a boy."

"Madre! How strange!"

The girl was looking up at her mother. Her dark eyes--almost Sicilian
eyes they were--opened very wide, and her lips remained slightly
parted after she had spoken.

"I wonder why that was?" she said at length.

"I have wondered too. It may have been that I was always thinking of
your father in those days, recalling him--well, recalling him as he
had been in Sicily. He went away from me so suddenly that somehow his
going, even when it had happened, for a long time seemed to be an
impossibility. And I fancied, I suppose, that my child would be him in
a way."

"Come back?"

"Or never quite gone."

The girl was silent for a moment.