“It does the Signorina good to get a breath of air before she goes to bed,” Hermione added, after a moment of silence. “It makes her sleep.”
“Si, Signora.”
He still stood calmly beside her, but now he looked at her with the odd directness which had been characteristic of him as a boy, and which he had not lost as a man.
“The Signorina is getting quite big, Signora,” he said. “Have you noticed? Per Dio! In Sicily, if the Signorina was a Sicilian, the giovinotti would be asking to marry her.”
“Ah, but, Gaspare, the Signorina is not a Sicilian,” she said. “She is English, you know, and English girls do not generally think of such things till they are much older than Sicilians.”
“But, Signora,” said Gaspare, with the bluntness which in him was never rudeness, but merely the sincerity which he considered due to his Padrona—due also to himself, “my Padrone was like a real Sicilian, and the Signorina is his daughter. She must be like a Sicilian too, by force.”
“Your Padrone, yes, he was a real Sicilian,” Hermione said softly. “But, well, the Signorina has much more English blood in her veins than Sicilian. She has only a little Sicilian blood.”
“But the Signorina thinks she is almost a Sicilian. She wishes to be a Sicilian.”
“How do you know that, Gaspare?” she asked, smiling a little at his firmness and persistence.
“The Signorina said so the other day to the giovinotto who had the cigarettes, Signora. I talked to him, and he told me. He said the Signorina had said to him that she was partly a Sicilian, and that he had said ‘no,’ that she was English. And when he said that—he said to me—the Signorina was quite angry. He could see that she was angry by her face.”