"Come, Doretta, come…Is this the way you keep your daddy company?…Enough of this, Doretta."
But, say what he pleases, Doretta must have her cry. Her brown eyes are swimming in tears, her little breast heaves, her voice is broken by sobs.
"What ridiculous whims!" Signer Odoardo exclaims, throwing his head back against the sofa cushions.
Signor Odoardo is unjust, and, what is worse, he does not believe what he is saying. He knows that this is no whim of Doretta's. He knows it better than the child herself, who would probably find it difficult to explain what she is undergoing. It is at once the presentiment of a new danger and the renewal of a bygone sorrow. Doretta was barely six years old when her mother died, and yet her remembrance is indelibly impressed upon the child's mind. And now it seems as though her mother were dying again.
"When you have finished crying, Doretta, you may come here," Signor
Odoardo says.
Doretta, crouching in a corner of the room, cries less vehemently, but has not yet finished crying. Just like the weather outside,—it snows less heavily, but it still snows.
Signor Odoardo covers his eyes with his hand.
How many thoughts are thronging through his head, how many affections are contending in his heart! If he could but banish the vision of Signora Evelina—but he tries in vain. He is haunted by those blue eyes, by that persuasive smile, that graceful and harmonious presence. He has but to say the word, and he knows that she will be his, to brighten his solitary home, and fill it with life and love. Her presence would take ten years from his age, he would feel as he did when he was betrothed for the first time. And yet—no; it would not be quite like the first time.
He is not the same man that he was then, and she, THE OTHER, ah, how different SHE was from the Signora Evelina! How modest and shy she was! How girlishly reserved, even in the expression of her love! How beautiful were her sudden blushes, how sweet the droop of her long, shyly-lowered lashes! He had known her first in the intimacy of her own home, simple, shy, a good daughter and a good sister, as she was destined to be a good wife and mother. For a while he had loved her in silence, and she had returned his love. One day, walking beside her in the garden, he had seized her hand with sudden impetuosity, and raising it to his lips had said, "I care for you so much!" and she, pale and trembling, had run to her mother's arms, crying out, "Oh, how happy I am!"
Ah, those dear days—those dear days! He was a poet then; with the accent of sincerest passion he whispered in his love's ear: