It was true that the girl had changed within a few weeks, and her mother saw it.  Her smile was not the same, and her eyes were deeper.  She had begun to gather her hair in a knot, closer to her head, and that altered her expression a little and made her look much older; but there was more than that, there was something very hard to describe, something one might call conviction—­the conviction that the world is real, which comes upon girlhood as suddenly as waking on sleep, or sleep on waking.  She had crossed the narrow borderland between play and earnest, and she had crossed it very soon.

“He will come back,” she said.  “He went away on that little ship that was tossing in the storm.  I know it, though I cannot tell how he got out to it through the breaking waves.”

“That is perfectly impossible, child,” said Maddalena with certainty.

“Never mind.  If we knew what ship that was, and where she is now, we could find Marcello.  I am as sure of it as I am sure of seeing you at this moment.  You know you often say that my presentiments come true.  As soon as we knew he was gone I thought of the little ship.”

It was natural, perhaps.  The picture of the small brigantine, fighting for existence, had graved itself in her memory.  With its crew so near death, it had been the only thing within sight that suggested human life after Marcello was gone.  The utter impossibility of a man’s swimming out through the raging sea that broke upon the bar was nothing compared with Aurora’s inward conviction that the little vessel had borne away the secret of his disappearance.  And she had not been wrecked:  Aurora knew that, for a wreck anywhere on the Roman shore would have been spoken of at once.  They are unfortunately common enough, and since her childhood Aurora had more than once seen a schooner’s masts sticking up out of the treacherous water a cable’s length from the shore.  The brigantine had got away, for the gale had moderated very suddenly, as spring gales do in the Mediterranean, just when the captain was making up his mind to let go both anchors and make a desperate attempt to save his vessel by riding out the storm—­a forlorn hope with such ground tackle as he had in his chain lockers.  And then he had stood out, and had sailed away, one danger more behind him in his hard life, and one less ahead.  He had sailed away—­whither?  No one could tell.  Those little vessels, built in the south of Italy, often enough take salt to South America, and are sold there, cargo and all; and some of the crew stay there, and some get other ships, but almost all are dispersed.  The keeper of the San Lorenzo tower, who had been a deep-water man, had told Aurora about it.  He himself had once gone out in a Sicilian brigantine from Trapani, and had stayed away three years, knocking about the world in all sorts of craft.