“This blessed room is as cold as ever.”

“Why shouldn’t it be,” Doretta retorts with a touch of asperity, “when you open the window every few minutes?”

“Oho,” Signer Odoardo says to himself, “it is time to have this matter out.”

And, going up to Doretta, he takes her by the hand, leads her to the sofa, and lifts her on his knee.

“Now, then, Doretta, why is it that you are so disagreeable to Signora Evelina?”

The little girl, not knowing what to answer, grows red and embarrassed.

“What has Signora Evelina done to you?” her father continues.

“She hasn’t done anything to me.”

“And yet you don’t like her.”

Profound silence.

“And she likes you so much!”

“I don’t care if she does!”

“You naughty child!...And what if, one of these days, you had to live with Signora Evelina?”

“I won’t live with her—­I won’t live with her!” the child bursts out.

“Now you are talking foolishly,” Signor Odoardo admonishes her in a severe tone, setting her down from his knee.

She bursts into passionate weeping.

“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.