drive she kept wishing that
Amaldi could have come with her.

Next afternoon the Marchesa called. She was a tall, finely made woman of
the Juno type, with beautiful, light brown, sparkling eyes under jet
black eyebrows, and a fluff of silken, fox-grey hair that must have been
gold-red when she was young. But then, as it was, youth unquenchable
laughed from those shrewd, brilliant eyes, though she was sixty. Her
little bonnet of white camellias with its big, black bow, that so became
her, was all Paris in a hat-frame. She evidently had a "sweet-tooth" for
confections in dress, just as some people have for actual bonbons.

She had not talked in her natural, easy, laughing way for ten minutes
before Sophy thought her the most delightful woman she had ever known.
She asked almost at once to see Bobby--won his heart immediately. Told
Sophy that she needn't worry in the least about doctors on the
Lake--that there was an excellent one, an old friend of hers, at
Stresa--Cesare Camenis.

"Eh!--the _tousin_ (little fellow) has adopted me for his Nonna!" she
added, laughing again the next instant, as Bobby hauled himself up by
her fan-chain and tried to pull off her bonnet, saying:

"Take off! Tay wiv Bobby!"

As for Sophy, if she had not fallen in love with Amaldi, she had
certainly fallen in love with his mother. The feeling was mutual. The
Marchesa had had two sons but no daughter. She had always longed for a
little girl. Now she thought that she would like to have had a daughter
as much like Sophy as possible. And, as this thought came to her, it
brought another less agreeable.

The sad destiny of her Marco made the Marchesa very lenient in facing
certain problems, though she was essentially a woman of broad, indulgent
views. Since twenty-six (he was now thirty-one) he had lived like a
widower whom some mistaken vow has cut off from re-marrying. Not that
the Marchesa deceived herself with the credulity of the average
Anglo-Saxon mother in such cases. She did not for one moment think that
her son had led the life of an ascetic during this enforced widowhood.
Light _liaisons_ she knew well there had been; but Marco was not a
sensualist. Such flitting fires could never really warm or console him.
And as she looked now at Sophy, thinking how pleasant it would be to
have such a daughter, she also realised that this lovely, tall girl,
with her spellbound looking grey eyes, and sensitive, romantic mouth,
was the very type of w