Thus it was that Enrica came to accept the marchesa’s rough tongue, her arrogance, and her caprices, as a normal state of existence.  She never complained.  If she suffered, it was in silence.  To reason with the marchesa, much more dispute with her, was worse than useless.  She was not accustomed to be talked to, certainly not by her niece.  It only exasperated her and fixed her more doggedly in whatever purpose she might have in hand.  But there was a certain stern sense of justice about her when left to herself—­if only the demon of her family pride were not aroused, then she was inexorable—­that would sometimes come to the rescue.  Yet, under all the tyranny of this neutral life which circumstances had imposed on her, Enrica, unknown to herself—­for how should she, who knew so little, know herself?—­grew up to have a strong will.  She might be bent, but she would never break.  In this she resembled the marchesa.  Gentle, loving, and outwardly submissive, she was yet passively determined.  Even the marchesa came to be dimly conscious of this, although she considered it as utterly unimportant, otherwise than to punish and to repress.

Shut up within the dreary palace at Lucca, or in the mountain solitude of Corellia, Enrica yearned for freedom.  She was like a young bird, full-fledged and strong, that longs to leave the parent-nest—­to stretch its stout wings on the warm air—­to soar upward into the light!

Now the light had come to Enrica.  It came when she first saw Count Nobili.  It shone in her eyes, it dazzled her, it intoxicated her.  On that day a new world opened before her—­a fair and pleasant world, light with the dawn of love—­a world as different as golden summer to the winter of her home.  How she gloried in Nobili!  How she loved him!—­his comely looks, his kindling smile (like sunshine everywhere), his lordly ways, his triumphant prosperity!  He had come to her, she knew not how.  She had never sought him.  He had come—­come like fate.  She never asked herself if it was wrong or right to love him.  How could she help it?  Was he not born to be loved?  Was he not her own—­a thousand times her own—­as he told her—­“forever?” She believed in him as she believed in God.  She neither knew nor cared whither she was drifting, so that it was with him!  She was as one sailing with a fair wind on an endless sea—­a sea full of sunlight—­sailing she knew not where!  Think no evil of her, I pray you.  She was not wicked nor deceitful—­only ignorant, with such ignorance as made the angels fall.

As yet Nobili and Enrica had only met in such manner as has been told by old Carlotta to her gossip Brigitta.  Letters, glances, sighs, had passed across the street, from palace to palace at the Venetian casements—­under the darkly-ivied archway of the Moorish garden—­at the cathedral in the gray evening light, or in the earliest glow of summer mornings—­and this, so seldom!  Every time they had met Nobili implored Enrica, passionately, to escape from the thralldom of her life, implored her to become his wife.  With his pleading eyes fixed upon her, he asked her “why she should sacrifice him to the senseless pride of her aunt?  He whose whole life was hers?”