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. Such a communication would need no
acknowledgment beyond a spoken word of thanks, which she would bestow
upon him the next time they met. It should contain nothing warmer than
the assurance of his anxiety to be of service to her, in anything she
undertook, and a protestation of respectful friendship at the end.

He wrote that first letter over twice and read it carefully before he
sent it. It referred to an historical question connected with the house
of Anjou, from which her castle of Muro had come to the Serra by a
marriage, several centuries ago, and by which marriage Veronica traced
her descent on one side to the kings of France. The castle itself had
been twice the scene of royal murders, and there were many strange
traditions connected with it. Gianluca got the information he needed
from the library downstairs, and he found ample material for a letter
of some length.

But it was not dry and uninteresting, a mere copy of notes taken from
histories and chronicles. The man had an undeveloped literary talent, as
has been said, and he instinctively found light and graceful expressions
for hard facts. He was himself discovering that he had a gift for
writing, and the pleasure of the discovery enhanced the delight of
writing to the woman he loved. The man of letters who has first found
out his own facility in the course of daily writing to a dearly loved
woman alone knows the sort of pleasure that Gianluca enjoyed, when he
found that it was his pen that helped him, and not he that was driving
his pen.

He sent what he had written, and determined that on the following day he
would go to the villa again. To his surprise and joy, he received a note
from Veronica in the morning, thanking him warmly for the pains he had
taken, and asking another question. It came through the post; and with
his insight into feminine ways, he guessed that she had not wished to
send a messenger to him,--a servant, who would have at once told other
servants of the correspondence.

Veronica had been pleased by the letter. She was beginning to like him
for himself, and to forget how very foolish he had seemed to be when he
was declaring his passion for her. But his letter showed him all at
once in an en