Donna Veronica kissed her aunt’s fresh cheek coldly, and drew back as soon as she could.

“I am glad that you are pleased,” she answered in a cool and colourless voice.

She felt that she had said enough, and, so far as she expected any thanks, her aunt had said too much.  She had made the will and had signed it, for the sake of peace, and she asked nothing but peace in return.  Ever since she had left the convent in which she had been educated and had come to live with her aunt, the question of this will had arisen at least once every day, and she knew by heart every argument which had been invented to induce her to make it.  The principal one had always been the same.  She had been told that if, in the inscrutable ways of Providence, she should chance to die young, unmarried and childless, the whole of the great Acireale property would go to relations whom she had never seen and of whom she scarcely knew the names.  This, the Countess Macomer had insisted, would be a terrible misfortune, and as human life was uncertain, even when one was very young, it was the duty of Veronica to provide against it, by leaving everything to the one remaining member of the Serra family who, with herself, represented the direct line, who had taken a mother’s place and duties in bringing up the orphan girl, and who had been ready to sacrifice every personal consideration for the sake of the child’s welfare.

Veronica did not see clearly that the Countess Macomer had ever really sacrificed anything at all in the execution of her trust as guardian, any more than the count himself, who, with Cardinal Campodonico, was a joint trustee, had ever been put to any inconvenience, beyond that of being the uncle by marriage of one of the richest heiresses in Italy.  It was natural that when she had signed the will at last, she should receive her aunt’s effusive thanks rather coldly, and that she should show very little enthusiasm when her uncle kissed her forehead and expressed his appreciation of her loving intention.  The plain truth was that if she had refused any longer to sign the will, the two would have made her life even more unbearable than it was already.

She knew that there was no reason why her life should be made hard to bear.  She was not only rich, and a princess in her own right.  She was young and, if not pretty, at least fairly well endowed with those gifts which attract and please, and bring their possessor the daily little satisfactions that make something very like happiness, before passion throws its load into the scales of life on the right side or the wrong.  She knew that, at her age, she might have been married already, and she wondered that her aunt should not have proposed to marry her before now.  Yet in this she was not displeased, for her best friend, Bianca Campodonico, had been married two years already to Corleone, of evil fame, and was desperately unhappy.  Veronica dreaded a like fate, and was in no haste to find a husband.  The countess told her always that she should be free to choose one for herself within reasonable limits of age, name, and fortune.  Such an heiress, with such a fortune, said Matilde Macomer, could marry whom she pleased.  But so far as Veronica had been allowed to see the world, the choice seemed anything but large.