"He was singing. I heard him, and his voice made me feel--" She
paused.

"What?" said her mother.

"I don't know. /Un poco diavolesca/, I'm afraid. One thing, though! It
made me long to be a boy."

"Did it?"

"Yes! Madre, tell me truly--sea-water on your lips, as the fishermen
say--now truly, did you ever want me to be a boy?"

Hermione Delarey did not answer for a moment. She looked away over the
still sea, that seemed to be slowly losing its color, and she thought
of another sea, of the Ionian waters that she had loved so much. They
had taken her husband from her before her child was born, and this
child's question recalled to her the sharp agony of those days and
nights in Sicily, when Maurice lay unburied in the Casa del Prete, and
afterwards in the hospital at Marechiaro--of other days and nights in
Italy, when, isolated with the Sicilian boy, Gaspare, she had waited
patiently for the coming of her child.

"Sea-water, Madre, sea-water on your lips!"

Her mother looked down at her.

"Do you think I wished it, Vere?"