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Updated: May 1, 2025
Gianluca thanked her, smiling too, and the impression any one would have had was that they thoroughly understood each other. He bowed again and went out. Veronica turned to come back to the tea-table and found herself facing Taquisara's fiery eyes. She was surprised, and looked into his face, very near to him, and waiting for him to stand aside.
Yet Gianluca breathed, and was a human man, and loved her, and he would have been strangely surprised had he suddenly seen into her heart and understood that she looked upon him as though he were a being out of another world. The moment when she had first laid her hand upon his had been the supremest of his life yet lived, and all the moments since had been as supremely happy.
There was something in her attitude, just for a few seconds, in her ghastly pallor, in the tones of her voice, that went through Gianluca like a knife. The dreadful instinctive certainty that she loved the man she had so nearly killed, took possession of him in a dark prevision of terror.
But when he came, as he did, twice a week, to the villa, they rarely spoke of their correspondence. Somehow it had come to be a bond linking certain sides of their natures which they did not show to each other when they met and talked. They never could talk as freely as they wrote, even upon the most indifferent subjects, though Gianluca seemed perfectly at his ease in conversation.
She looked again; he had not moved. She threw herself upon her knees, beside his great chair, her clasped hands on his thin shoulder, in a sort of agony of despair. "Speak to me!" she cried. "Forgive me say that I have not killed you Gianluca dear!" One shadowy hand of his was lifted, and touched hers. It was as cold as though it had lain dead in the dew. She took it quickly and held it fast.
This is God's earth, Donna Veronica not society's!" Veronica said nothing; but there was perplexity in her face, and she looked down, and pulled at one finger of her glove. She was wondering whether, if she came on the next day, and stood with Gianluca della Spina on that very spot, he would speak for himself as strongly and well as his friend had been speaking for him.
Gianluca had talked with Veronica about all sorts of subjects, and she had often asked him questions which he had not been able to answer on the spur of the moment. It was easy for him, in his first letter, to hark back to one of those idle questions of hers, and to make his reply to it an excuse for a letter.
And I do say, what is to prevent Gianluca from being here to-morrow, or this very afternoon, as I am here now, and why should it be such a dreadful thing for you to come here, knowing that you will meet him? Do you think that he would not give the last drop of his blood, at one word from your lips, to save you from trouble, or danger, or insult?
She saw it, and was glad, for he pleased her more and more in the days that followed the great day, while Gianluca lay pale and happy and gaining a little strength, and she, as his wife, sat through many hours of the day by his bedside, reading to him, and telling him much about her life, but not often allowing him to speak much, lest he should lose ground and be in danger again.
Veronica was surprised at the ease and simplicity with which matters were arranged, and in a few seconds she found herself sitting beside Gianluca, on a narrow sofa at some distance from Bianca and Ghisleri. Gianluca looked at her sideways, and then a moment later she looked at him; but their eyes did not meet.
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