hey can sail." She looked
out to sea, and added: "I think the wind is changing to scirocco. They
may be later."

"He's gone down again!"

"I never saw you so interested in a diver before," said the mother.
"What made you begin to look at the boy?"

"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?"

"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.

"Povera Madre mia!" at last she said.

But she did not seem distressed for herself. No personal grievance,
no doubt of complete love assailed her. And the fact that this was so
demonstrated, very quietly and very completely, the relation existing
between this mother and this c