Lady Kilrush spent the sunset hour with her kindred, and was touched by the old man's delight when he clasped to his heart the child of that daughter he had loved and mourned. She knelt beside him with uncovered head as she told him the story of her childhood, her love for the mother she had lost before memory began. He turned her face to the sunset glow, and gazed at her with eyes drowned in tears. He was no longer the money-grubber, keenly expectant of a stranger's bounty. The whole nature of the man seemed changed by the awakening of an unforgotten love.
"Yes, it is Tonia's face," he cried. "I knew you were beautiful; I knew you were like her; but not how like. Your brow has the same lines, your lips have the same curves. Yes, now, as you smile at me, I see my beloved one again."
There was nothing sordid or vulgar in the peasant now. His countenance shone with the pure light of love, and Antonia's heart went out to him with some touch of filial affection.
Before they parted he gave her a letter—the ink dim with age—her mother's last letter, written from the Lincolnshire homestead where she died; and Antonia read of the love that had hung over her cradle, that tender maternal love she had been fated never to know.
She deferred her journey for a few days, at her grandfather's entreaty, and spent many hours at the villino. She encouraged Baptisto and Francesca to talk to her of all the details of their lives. She drew nearer to them in thought and feeling, and made new plans for their happiness, promising to come to Bellagio every autumn, and offering to build them a new house next year at the other end of their garden where the view was finer. But the old man protested that the villino would last his time, and that he would never like any house as well.
"Then the new house must be built for Francesca when she marries," Antonia told him gaily. "We will wait till she has a suitor she loves."