While she was speaking she had gone to the door, and she went out without looking back.  A moment later, she was by Gianluca’s side.  She saw that what Don Teodoro had said was true.  There was an undefinable change in his features since the previous day, and at the first sight of it her heart stood still an instant and the blood left her face, so that she felt very cold.  She kept her back to the light, that he might not see that she was disturbed, and while she asked him how he was, her hands touched, and displaced, and replaced the little objects on the small table beside him,—­the book, the glass, the flowers in the silver cup, the silver cigarette case, the things which, being quite helpless, he liked to have within his reach.

“I really feel better to-day,” he said, watching her lovingly, as he answered her question.  “I wish I could go out.”

“You can be carried out upon the balcony in a little while,” she said.  “It is too cool, yet.  It was a cold night, for we are getting near the end of August.”

“And in Naples they are sweltering in the heat,” he answered, smiling.  “It is beautiful here.  I can see the mountains through the open window, and the flowers tell me what the hillsides are like, in the sunshine.  Taquisara says that your maid brings them every morning.  Thank you—­of course it is one of your endless kind doings.”

“No,” replied Veronica, frankly.  “It is her way of showing her devotion, poor thing!  Everybody loves you in the house—­even the people who have hardly ever seen you.  The women, speak of you as ’that angel’!” She tried to laugh cheerfully.

“I am glad they like me, though I have done nothing to be liked by them.  Please thank your maid for me.  It is very kind of her.”

There was a little disappointment in his voice; for he had been happy in believing that Veronica sent the flowers herself, not because he needed coin of kindness to prove her wealth of friendship, but because whatever small thing came from her hand had so much more value for him than the greatest and most that any one else could give.

She sat down beside him, and endeavoured to talk as though she were quite unconcerned.  She tried not to look at his face, upon which it seemed to her that death was already fixing the last mask of life’s comedy.  It was the more terrible, because he was so quiet and so sure of life that morning, so convinced that he was better, so almost certain that he should get well.

It seemed an awful thing to sit there, talking against death; but she did her best not to think, and only to talk and talk on, and make him believe that she was cheerful, while, in a kind way, she kept him from coming back to within a phrase’s length of his love for her.  It was hard for him, too, to make any effort.  The doctor had said so.  And all the time, she fancied that his features became by degrees less mobile, and that the transparent pallor so long familiar to her was turning to another hue, grey and stony, which she had never seen.