aw the red come into her brown skin. She shook her
head without looking up or speaking.

"I wonder why," he said. "I think--I think there must be men who want
you."

She slightly raised her head.

"Oh yes, there are, signore. But--but I must wait till my father chooses
one."

"Your father will choose the man who is to be your husband?"

"Of course, signore."

"But perhaps you won't like him."

"Oh, I shall have to like him, signore."

She did not speak with any bitterness or sarcasm, but with perfect
simplicity. A feeling of pity that was certainly not Sicilian but that
came from the English blood in him stole into Maurice's heart. Maddalena
looked so soft and young in the dim beauty of the night, so ready to be
cherished, to be treated tenderly, or with the ardor that is the tender
cruelty of passion, that her childlike submission to the Sicilian code
woke in him an almost hot pugnacity. She would be given, perhaps, to some
hard brute of a fisherman who had scraped together more soldi than his
fellows, or to some coarse, avaricious contadino who would make her toil
till her beauty vanished, and she changed into a bowed, wrinkled
withered, sun-dried hag, while she was yet young in years.

"I wish," he said--"I wish, when you have to marry, I could choose your
husband, Maddalena."

She lifted her head quite up and regarded him with wonder.

"You, signorino! Why?"

"Because I would choose a man who would be very good to you, who would
love you and work for you and always think of you, and never look at
another woman. That is how your husband should be."

She looked more wondering.

"Are you like that, then, signore?" she asked. "With the signora?"

Maurice unclasped his hands from his knees, and dropped his feet down
from the bench.

"I!" he said, in a voice that had changed. "Oh--yes--I don't know."

He took the oars again and began to row farther out to sea.

"I was talking about you," he said, almost roughly.

"I have never seen your signora," said Maddalena. "What is she like?"
Maurice saw Hermione before him in the night, tall, flat, with her long
arms, her rugged, intelligent face, her enthusiastic brown eyes.

"Is she pretty?" continued Maddalena. "Is she as young as I am?"

"She is good, Maddalena," Maurice answered.

"Is she santa?"

"I don't mean that. But she is good to every one."

"But is she pretty, too?" she persisted. "And young?"

"She is not at all old. Some day you shall