Her guests went to bed early.  While Gianluca was before her, Veronica had not retained the impression she had received from Taquisara, that her friend was a doomed man.  Her own vitality lent the sure certainty of life, in her imagination, to those about her.  He was faint and tired from the journey, of course, but he was by no means the utterly helpless invalid she had expected to see, and she had not believed, so long as she could watch him, that he was in mortal danger.  But when she was in her own room, his face came back to her, a pale shade out of dark shadow, and she saw the hollows about his deep blue eyes, his thin, bluish temples, his transparent features, and his emaciated throat, that seemed to have fallen away under his white ears.  She was so suddenly and violently disturbed by the recollection that she spoke to Elettra of him.  The woman had seen him go by when the party had arrived.

“Do you think that Don Gianluca looks very ill?” Veronica asked.

“Excellency—­” the maid hesitated.  “I wish that all may live—­but he seems a dead man.”

Veronica said nothing, but it was long before she got to sleep that night, and the vision of his face came again and again to her, pale, haggard, haunting, distressing her exceedingly.  She rose even earlier than usual.

She did not mean that the presence of her guests should interfere with what had now become a connected work, to interrupt which would be an injury to the whole and an injustice to the people who had learned to expect it of her, looking for more, as she gave them more, and turning to her in every difficulty.  But for the arrival of the party on the previous afternoon she would have gone down to an outlying farm in the valley, where the farmhouse needed repairs and there was a question of cutting down a number of olive trees so old that they hardly bore any fruit.  She had ordered her mare at half-past seven in the morning, and she rode down the long, winding road, saw, judged, and gave orders, galloped most of the way up, and exchanged her riding-habit for her morning frock before the clock struck ten.

One after another, her guests appeared, and everything happened as she had foreseen.  The old couple said that they were accustomed to take a little walk before the midday meal, for the sake of their appetite; Taquisara disappeared when he had helped Gianluca to a big chair in a balcony, in the shade, outside the drawing-room, and Gianluca was left alone with her, as she had expected.  She established herself opposite to him, for the balcony was so narrow that two chairs could not be placed upon it side by side.