But Veronica would not.  Gianluca was improving, and before long he would walk.  She had set her heart upon it, that he should be strong again.  She would not have her people think that he was a cripple.  The people were peasants, the Duchessa answered, peasants like any others.  Why should the Princess of Acireale care what such creatures thought?  But Veronica’s eyes gleamed, and she said that they were her own people and a part of her life, and she told the Duchessa all that was in her mind, very frankly, and so innocently, yet with such unbending determination to have her way, that the Duchessa did not know what to do.  Thereupon, after the manner of futile people, she repeated herself, and the struggle began again.

It was a tragedy that had begun.  Veronica had escaped with her life from Matilde Macomer to find out in the consequence of her own free deeds what tragedy really meant, and how bitter the fruit of good could be.

Nor in the slightest degree had her affection for Gianluca diminished, nor did it change in itself, as days followed days to full weeks, and week choked week, cramming whole months back into time’s sack, for time to bear away and cast into the abyss of the useless and irrevocable past.

Still he was her friend, still she would give her life to save him, and would have given it again if it had been to give.  Still she could talk with him, and listen to him, and answer smile and word and gesture.  She could sit beside him through quiet hours, and drive with him in the vast, still sunshine of that golden autumn, calling him by gentler names than friend and touching his hand softly in the long silence.  All this she could do, and if there were ever any effort in it, that was surely not an effort to be kind, but one of those little doubting, uncertain, spontaneous efforts which we make whenever we unconsciously begin to feel that it will not be enough to do right, but that we must also seem to do right in other eyes, lest our right be thought half hearted.

The days were monotonous, but it was not their monotony which she felt, so much as that irrevocable quality of them all which made a grey background in her soul, against which something was moving, undefined, strong as the unseen wind, yet mistily visible sometimes, having more life than shape—­a terrible thing which drew her to it against her will, and yet a thing which had in it much besides terror.

She turned from it when she knew that it was there, and fixed her sight upon Gianluca’s face.  Sometimes she found comfort in that, and she did all that was required of her, and more also, and was glad to do it.

But the wrong done to nature was deeper and more real than all the good she could do to hide it, and it cried out against her continually by the voice of the woman’s instinct.  It was not Gianluca who became intolerable to her, but she herself, and it was to escape from herself that she clung to him closely, as well as out of affection for him; for when she was by herself she was no longer alone.  That other unshaped something kept her company.