"Oh! Cornelius, what a great painter you will yet be! How much fame and honour await you! Well, why do you smile so?" I added, somewhat annoyed: "is it not true?"
"Because, as you speak, your cheeks flush, and your eyes kindle. You look like a young sybil just now, Daisy."
"A sybil in white muslin!" I replied, laughing in his face; but remembering how disrespectful this was, I became suddenly grave again. He seemed anything but offended, and listened like one whose ear has caught a pleasant sound.
"Do you know," he said, "I think this is the first time I ever heard you laugh outright. I remember your smile, but not your laugh. Oh, Daisy, are you sure you are the same? When I hear your voice, I think of my pale, sickly child. When I look, I am perplexed to see a tall, slender girl— fair as a lily, fresh as a rose, demure as a young Quakeress, yet who looks kindly at me, like an old acquaintance. Speak!—say something that will throw a sort of bridge from the past to the present."
"The only bridge I can give you is, that you have been two years away; that I am now always well, instead of being always ill; and that, as I began at the wrong end, by being dull as a child, I now mean to make up for the lost time by being as merry and as mad as I can."
"How old are you?"
"You have already asked me. Subtract ten years from your own age and you will know."
"What is ten years?"
"A mere trifle, like the walk awhile ago."
"Then in another year you will be eighteen."