"But we needn't stop to be very rich before we go and carry some of the nice things to mammy," rejoined Cherry anxiously.
"No, no, indeed! We will but make a little turn in the country, and come back princes. But mind you this, picciola: I am to be your father now, or all the same; and I shall tell every one that you are my own little girl: so you must never say, 'Not so.'"
"But mammy said my father was dead, and Teddy said so too. He was
Michael darlint."
"I doubt not that Signor Michaelli died, and has gone to glory; but I strangely doubt if he were thy father, picciola," said the Italian with a grave smile. "However that may be, forget that you have ever had other father than me, and call me so always: 'Mio padre,' you must say, and no more 'Varny. Also, too, you must speak in Italian, as I shall to you; and never, as you do now, in English."
"But mammy and Teddy don't know Italian," said Cherry, beginning to look a little troubled.
"'In Rome, do as the Romans do.' When you are again with the woman and boy, speak as they speak: with me, speak as I speak."
Giovanni said this more decidedly than he had ever spoken before, and Cherry looked quickly up at him.
"Is that the way you talk because you want to make believe you are my father?" asked she.
A sudden smile shot across the Italian's face, lighting its dark features like a gleam of sunshine sweeping across a pine-clad mountain-land.
"Shame were it to me, dear little heart, if to be thy father were to make thee less happy than thou hast been with those others," said he softly in Italian, and using the form of address, which, in almost every language but the English, marks a different and more tender relation from that indicated by the more formal plural pronoun.