She slightly raised her head.
"Oh yes, there are, signore. But—but I must wait till my father chooses one."
"Your father will choose the man who is to be your husband?"
"Of course, signore."
"But perhaps you won't like him."
"Oh, I shall have to like him, signore."
She did not speak with any bitterness or sarcasm, but with perfect simplicity. A feeling of pity that was certainly not Sicilian but that came from the English blood in him stole into Maurice's heart. Maddalena looked so soft and young in the dim beauty of the night, so ready to be cherished, to be treated tenderly, or with the ardor that is the tender cruelty of passion, that her childlike submission to the Sicilian code woke in him an almost hot pugnacity. She would be given, perhaps, to some hard brute of a fisherman who had scraped together more soldi than his fellows, or to some coarse, avaricious contadino who would make her toil till her beauty vanished, and she changed into a bowed, wrinkled withered, sun-dried hag, while she was yet young in years.
"I wish," he said—"I wish, when you have to marry, I could choose your husband, Maddalena."
She lifted her head quite up and regarded him with wonder.
"You, signorino! Why?"