That was impossible, however, and while she was slowly dressing she tried to decide what she should do.  It was easy enough to make up her mind that she must see Gianluca, but it was much more difficult to determine exactly how she should find an excuse for going out alone on such a morning.  It seemed probable that, whatever she might propose as a reason, her aunt would immediately wish to accompany her.  They had given her the afternoon and the evening of the previous day in which to think over her answer, and Matilde might naturally enough expect to hear it this morning.  In any case she should not be able to order the carriage and slip out alone as she had done the first time.  She had meant to go out on foot with her maid, and then to take a cab in the street and drive to the villa.  But in such weather as this she could not do such a thing without exciting remark.  It was a week-day, and there were no masses to hear, as an excuse, by the time she was dressed.

She watched herself in the glass, while her maid was doing her hair.  The dull light of the rainy morning made her own face look grey and sallow.  She had not slept very well, and her eyes were heavy, she thought.  The glaring whiteness of the thing she had thrown over her shoulders while her hair was being brushed made her look worse.  She had little vanity about her appearance, as a rule, but on that particular day she would have been glad to look her best.

Not that she at all believed that Gianluca was dying for her; but he was certainly in love with her.  Of that she felt sure, for she could not suppose that Taquisara himself was not convinced of the fact.  Nor had she the smallest beginning of a tender sentimentality about the fair-haired young man.  Nevertheless, if she was to meet him, she did not wish to be positively ugly, as she seemed to be to herself when she looked into the mirror, facing the dulness of the rain-beaten window.  Whether she herself was ever to care for him or not, she somehow did not wish to disappoint him by her appearance, and the undefined fear lest she might affected her spirits.  Then, before she had quite finished dressing, Matilde Macomer knocked at the door and came in.  She was looking far worse than Veronica, and from the absence of colour in her face, her eyes seemed to be more near together than ever.  Her appearance made Veronica feel a little more hopeful, and the young girl said to herself that after all the light of a rainy day was unbecoming to every one, and much more so to a woman of forty than to a girl of twenty.

She did not wish to be alone with her aunt if she could help it, and she promptly invented several little things for her maid to do, in order to keep the latter in the room.  The maid was a thin, dark woman of middle age, from the mountains.  She was a widow, and her husband had been an under-steward on the Serra estate at Muro, who had been brutally murdered five years earlier by half a dozen peasants whose rents had been raised, when he endeavoured to exact payment.  The rents had been raised by Gregorio Macomer, and the woman knew it, and remembered.  But she was very quiet and grave, and seemed to be satisfied with her position.  She was certainly devoted to Veronica.  Matilde glanced at her two or three times, as though wishing her to go, but Veronica paid no attention to the hint.