“It is no wonder.  You changed the whole future with one word.  You seemed really to want my letters much more than I had imagined that you did.”

As by the quick lifting of a dividing veil, all the awkward little incidents and memories of constraint had suddenly become parts of the much larger and more pleasant recollection of their semi-secret intimacy, and in blending with the broader picture the little ones somehow ceased to have anything disagreeable in them, and instead, there was a touch of humour and a suggestion of laughter each time that they compared what they had said and done with what they had written and felt.  It was no wonder that the fascination grew on Gianluca with every dancing beat of the happy man’s pulse.

They talked on, and in the way she talked Veronica showed that while her character had grown in three-quarters of a year from girlhood to womanhood, and from womanhood to the half-imperial masculinity of a dictatress, her heart was younger than the youngest, was as unsuspicious of itself as a child’s, ready to give itself in an innocent generosity which could not conceive that giving might mean being taken, or be as like it as to deceive such a willing, love-sick man as poor Gianluca.  She did not say that she loved him, she did not love him, she did not wish him to think that she could love him.  Why should he think that she did?  Surely, that he loved her, or thought so, could make no difference.

She was so very young, under her armour of despotism, that she might almost have loved him, as she had all but loved Bosio, had there been anything to love.  But there was not.  Gianluca was a shadow, an unmaterial being, a thought—­anything ethereal, but not a man.

The dream-driven ghost of her dead betrothed was ten times more human and real than Gianluca was to her now, with his white angel’s face and misty hands that seemed to hang weightless in the air before him when he moved them.  There was more of living humanity in the fast fainting echo of Bosio’s last words to her than in Gianluca’s clear, sweet tones.  If he should tell her that he loved her now, she should perhaps not even blush; for his whole being was sifted and refined and distilled, as the very spirit of star dust, in which there was nothing left of that sweet, earthly living, breathing, dying, loving flesh and blood without which love itself is but a scholar’s word, and passion means but a vague, spiritual suffering, in which there is neither hope of joy to come nor memory of any past.

Yet Gianluca breathed, and was a human man, and loved her, and he would have been strangely surprised had he suddenly seen into her heart and understood that she looked upon him as though he were a being out of another world.  The moment when she had first laid her hand upon his had been the supremest of his life yet lived, and all the moments since had been as supremely happy.  It was something which he had not dared to hope—­to hear her speaking as though there had never been that veil between them, against which he had so often struggled, to feel her warm touch, to see the happy light in her young eyes as she sat there looking at him, to be sure at last, beyond the half assurance of uncertain written words.