Don Teodoro could not help smiling in a hopeless sort of way, and he lifted his hands a moment, spreading out the palms as though to express that he cleared his conscience of all possible responsibility.  So they parted good friends, without further words.

But when Veronica was alone, she began to realize that Don Teodoro was not so altogether in the wrong as she believed herself to be in the right.  People might certainly be found whom she could not class with the world she so frankly despised, and who would say that if Gianluca recovered she should marry him, after extending such an invitation to him and his people, and that, if she did not, she would deserve to be called a heartless flirt—­from their point of view.  Gianluca’s father and mother might say so.

He himself, at least, must know her better than that, she thought.  And then, there was the terrible earnestness of Taquisara’s letter, the sober statement of his best friend, next to herself, and a statement which it must have cost the man something to make, since it was necessarily accompanied by an apology.  After all, though he had insulted her, she liked Taquisara for the whole-hearted way in which he took Gianluca’s part in everything.  There was that statement, and she felt that it was a true one.  Gianluca was more to her than any one she knew, in a way which no one could understand, and she had a right to see him before he died.  If, by any happy chance, he should live, people might perhaps talk.  She should not care, for she should have done right.  That was the way in which she accounted to herself for her action; but the consciousness that Don Teodoro was not quite wrong was there.  She remembered it afterwards, when the fatality that was quietly lying in wait for her raised its head from ambush and stared her in the face.  But then, at the first beginning, she was angry with the old priest for trying to oppose her.

There was not more than time to finish the preparations, after all, for she received a note from the Duchessa, written from Eboli, saying that they would arrive a day earlier than they had expected, as the heat in the plain was intense, and they were anxious to get Gianluca to a cooler region of the mountains as soon as possible.  Veronica had written, too, placing the castle at Laviano at their disposal, as a resting-place, so as to break the journey more easily for the invalid, and she sent men over to see that all was in order and to take a few necessary things for the guests.

It was a sort of caravan that at last halted before the fountain of Muro, at the entrance to the village.  Veronica had been warned of their near approach, and was there to meet them, with Don Teodoro by her side.

First came the Duca and Duchessa together in a huge carriage drawn by four horses, with three servants, two men and a maid.  Veronica could not see past the vehicle, as it blocked the way, and she stopped beside it to greet the couple.