Veronica and Don Teodoro descended again, and he led her through many strange places, dimly lighted by small windows piercing ten feet of masonry, and through the enormous hall which had been the guard-room or barrack in old days, and had served as a granary since then, and up and down dark stairs, through narrow ways, out upon jutting bastions, down and up, backwards and forwards, as it seemed to her, till she could only guess at the direction in which she was going, by the glimpses of distant mountain and valley as she passed the irregularly placed windows.  Several of her people followed her, and one went before with a huge bunch of ancient keys, opening and shutting all manner of big and little doors before her and after her.  Now and then one of the men in green coats lighted a lantern and showed her where steep black steps led down into dark cellars, and vaults, and underground places.

She saw it all, but she was glad to get back to the room she already loved best, from which the balcony outside the windows looked down upon the valley.

And there she began at once to install herself, causing her books to be unpacked and arranged, as well as the few objects familiar to her eyes, which she had brought with her.  Among these was the photograph of Bosio Macomer.  Those of Gregorio and Matilde had disappeared.  She hesitated, as she held the picture in her hand, as to whether she should keep it in her bedroom, or in the sitting-room, in which she meant chiefly to live, and she looked at it with sad eyes.  She decided that it should be in the sitting-room.  Where everything was hers, she had a right to show what had been all but quite hers at the last.  The six brass candlesticks were taken away, and Bosio’s photograph was set upon the long, low mantelpiece.  His death had after all been more a surprise, a horror, a disappointment, than the wound it might have been if she had really loved him, and it is only the wound that leaves a scar.  The momentary shock is presently forgotten when the young nerves are rested and the vision of a great moment fades to the half-tone of the general past.  Between her present, too, and the night of Bosio’s death, had come the attempt upon her own life, and all the sudden change that had followed the catastrophe.  She was too brave to realize, even now, that she might have died at Matilde’s hands.  She had to go over the facts to make herself believe that she had been almost killed.  But the whole affair had brought a revolution into her life, since Bosio had been gone.

Another companionship had taken the place of his, so that she hardly missed him now.  She would miss Gianluca’s letters far more than Bosio, if they should suddenly stop, and the mere thought that the correspondence might be broken off gave her a sharp little pain.  The idea crossed her mind while she was arranging her writing-table near her favourite window, for all writing seemed to be connected with Gianluca, so that she could not imagine passing more than a day or two without setting down something on paper which he was to read, and to answer.  To lose that close intimacy of thought would be to lose much.