By nature and talent, as well as by cultivation, Gianluca was admirably gifted for such a correspondence as he now attempted to begin.  In other circumstances of fortune he might have become eminent as a man of letters.  Without possessing any of that practical, masculine knowledge of women, which Taquisara so roughly expressed, Gianluca had a keen and sure understanding of the feminine mind.  There is no contradiction in that, for the men who know something of women’s hearts by instinct and experience are by no means always those who are in intellectual sympathy with them.  Very young women are sometimes surprised when they discover this fact, but men generally know it of one another; and the man of whom other men are jealous is rarely the one who prides himself upon knowing and sympathizing with the feminine point of view on things in general, from literature to dress.

Gianluca had talked with Veronica about all sorts of subjects, and she had often asked him questions which he had not been able to answer on the spur of the moment.  It was easy for him, in his first letter, to hark back to one of those idle questions of hers, and to make his reply to it an excuse for a letter.  Such a communication would need no acknowledgment beyond a spoken word of thanks, which she would bestow upon him the next time they met.  It should contain nothing warmer than the assurance of his anxiety to be of service to her, in anything she undertook, and a protestation of respectful friendship at the end.

He wrote that first letter over twice and read it carefully before he sent it.  It referred to an historical question connected with the house of Anjou, from which her castle of Muro had come to the Serra by a marriage, several centuries ago, and by which marriage Veronica traced her descent on one side to the kings of France.  The castle itself had been twice the scene of royal murders, and there were many strange traditions connected with it.  Gianluca got the information he needed from the library downstairs, and he found ample material for a letter of some length.

But it was not dry and uninteresting, a mere copy of notes taken from histories and chronicles.  The man had an undeveloped literary talent, as has been said, and he instinctively found light and graceful expressions for hard facts.  He was himself discovering that he had a gift for writing, and the pleasure of the discovery enhanced the delight of writing to the woman he loved.  The man of letters who has first found out his own facility in the course of daily writing to a dearly loved woman alone knows the sort of pleasure that Gianluca enjoyed, when he found that it was his pen that helped him, and not he that was driving his pen.

He sent what he had written, and determined that on the following day he would go to the villa again.  To his surprise and joy, he received a note from Veronica in the morning, thanking him warmly for the pains he had taken, and asking another question.  It came through the post; and with his insight into feminine ways, he guessed that she had not wished to send a messenger to him,—­a servant, who would have at once told other servants of the correspondence.