‘But I can’t refuse her anything!’ the padrona said with a sigh, that came out of the very bottom of her heart. There was the sting of it. She could not turn away, as impulse would have made her, the lover whom she felt to be her enemy. There was the child to be considered. It was no plain and easy matter to be decided upon in an arbitrary way. Fathers and mothers have refused their children’s wishes before now for their good. Daughters have been even shut up in their rooms, starved, imprisoned, bullied into giving up the undesirable suitor, as everybody knows. But these courses were not open to the padrona. She could no more have stood by and seen her child suffer than she could have flown. The one was as much an impossibility of nature as the other. She could not refuse Alice the desire of her heart. Oh, gentle heavens! to think it could be the desire of that tender creature’s heart to go away from her home where she had been cherished since ever she was born,--from her mother, who had loved and shielded her for all her sixteen years,--away to the end of the world with a young man, whom six months before she had never seen! And she not a woman with any weariness in her heart, nor a girl of adventurous instincts, curious and longing for the unknown, but, on the contrary, the purest womanly domestic child, caring little about all the noises of the great world without,--only sixteen, a soft, contented creature, happy in all the little business of her limited life! There was the wonder,--a thing not new, familiar every day;--and yet ever miraculous, a wonder and a portent to the padrona, as if it had never happened before.