But he was wise, and he bridled back the words that most readily of all others would have come to his lips.  Perhaps even in the midst of his new happiness, there was the unacknowledged fear of evil chance if he should speak too soon and put the beautiful gold to the touch while the magic transmutation was still so dazzlingly fresh.  The present was so immeasurably better than the past, so near a perfection of its own, that he could wait in it a while before he opened wide his arms to take in the very whole of happiness itself, wherewith the beautiful future stood full laden before him.

As they talked, they went over and over much that they had written to each other during the long months of their correspondence, and at last Veronica came back to the question she had at first asked him.

“So you think that I am sensible in living as I do,” she said.  “I am glad.  I value your opinion, you know.”

She had perhaps never said as much as that to any one.

“You have made it what it is,” he answered.

“How do you mean?” she asked quickly.

“You cannot do wrong,” he replied, with his faint, far-off laugh.  “If I had read in a book, of an imaginary person, all that you have written me of yourself, I should have said that most of it was absolutely impossible, or wildly rash, or foolishly unwise.  You know how we are all brought up.  We are nursed in the arms of tradition, we are fed on ideas of custom—­we are taken to walk, as children, by incarnate prejudice for a nursery maid, and taught to see things that used to be, where modern things are.  What can you expect?  We have not much originality by the time we grow up.”

“Yes—­you know that I was educated in a convent.”

“That is better than being educated at home by a priest.”  Gianluca smiled again.  “Besides, you are different.  That is why I say that if I have an opinion, you have made it for me.  You are doing all those things which I could not have believed in a book, and they are turning out well.  If society could see you here, it would not find it necessary to invent a duenna to chaperon you.  But it is not everybody who could do what you have done, and succeed.  I do not wonder that my mother is astonished, and my father, too.  But at the same time, since you can do such things, it seems to me that you would have made a great mistake in doing anything else—­as great a mistake as Julius Caesar would have made if he had chosen to remain a fashionable lawyer instead of mixing in politics, or Achilles, if he had taken a necklace or a bracelet and left the sword in Ulysses’ basket.  You would have found your mythical duenna a nuisance in real life.”

Veronica laughed.

“At the end of the first week I should have locked her up in the dungeon tower, to get rid of her,” she said.

“I have no doubt that you would, and your people would have thought it the most natural thing in the world.  You could do anything you pleased in this place, I fancy.  They would not think it strange if you tried and condemned a cheating steward and had him executed in that gloomy courtyard we passed through when we came in yesterday.”