He caught her up, covering her face with kisses.
"My love! my life! my darling! When Pietro is dead, and Zara is old and feeble, and Zenith dust and ashes, you will live, my radiant angel, my black-eyed beauty, to perpetuate the malediction. When his son is a man, you will be a woman, with all a woman's subtle power and more than a woman's beauty, and you will be his curse, and his bane, and his blight, as his father has been ours! Will you not, my little Sunbeam?"
"Yes, papa—yes, papa!" lisped the little one.
"Pietro!" called his wife, "if you have done breakfast, come up.
Mother is awake and would see you."
"Coming, carissima!"
He kissed the baby girl, placed her on the pallet, and sprung lightly up the steep stair.
The loft was just a shade less wretched than the apartment below. There was a bed on the floor, more decently covered, two broken chairs, a table with some medicine bottles and cups, and a white curtain on the one poor window.
On the bed lay a woman, over whom Pietro bent reverently the moment he entered the room. It was the wreck of a woman who, in the days gone by, must have been gloriously beautiful; who was beautiful still, despite the ravages years, sickness, and poverty had wrought.
The eyes that blazed brilliant and black were the eyes of Zara—the eyes of the baby Sunbeam below—and this woman was the mother of one, the grandmother of the other.
Pietro knelt by the pallet and tenderly kissed one transparent hand.
The great black eyes turned upon him wild and wide.