"Chi lo sa?" she responded.
He thought, when she said that, that her voice sounded less simple than before.
"You do know!" he said.
"You do!" he repeated.
He stretched out his hand and took her hand. He had to take it.
"Why don't you tell me?"
She had turned her head away from him, and now, speaking as if to the sea, she said:
"Perhaps if she was there you could not give me the blue silk dress and the—and the ear-rings. Perhaps she would not like it."
For a moment he thought he was disappointed by her answer. Then he knew that he loved it, for its utter naturalness, its laughable naïveté. It seemed, too, to set him right in his own eyes, to sweep away a creeping feeling that had been beginning to trouble him. He was playing with a child. That was all. There was no harm in it. And when he had kissed her in the dawn he had been kissing a child, playfully, kindly, as a big brother might. And if he kissed her now it would mean nothing to her. And if it did mean something—just a little more—to him, that did not matter.