nd if, in the midst of such
riches, the Falernian peasants were half starved, what must be the state
of the people on her lands in the Basilicata? Don Teodoro had drawn her
an accurate picture, full of those plain details which carry more than
the weight of their mere words. Something should be done at once. She
had given him power and money to help the very poorest, before she came;
but her common sense told her that the evil lay too deep in the soil to
be reached by a light shower of silver--or even by a storm of gold rain.

Inventors, great or small, are rarely theorists; the invention must be
suited to the necessity, before all things, and the theory may come
afterwards if anybody cares for it. For a theory is nothing but an
attempted explanation, and the fact must exist before it can possibly
need explaining. Bread is a great invention against hunger, and a man
needs to know nothing about the gastric juices to save himself from
starvation when the loaf is in his hand. Veronica meant to put the
loaves where they were needed, within reach of those who needed them.

As she was driven through the rugged country on that May afternoon, she
felt that she had a future before her, that she was going into action,
and leaving stagnation behind, and that her own life, which was to be
her very own, was just beginning. It was to be a life quite different
from the existence of any one she knew, for, unlike the lives of her
friends, hers was to have an integral, independent existence of its own,
with one determined object for all its activity.

The months she had passed in Bianca's house had rather strengthened than
weakened the unformulated resolution which she had first vaguely reached
in the dark days after Bosio's death. There had been much solitude, and
many rides and drives into the country with her beautiful, silent
friend; and there had been very little contact with the world to disturb
the onward current of her thoughts. More than all, the first breath of
liberty after long restraint had enlarged and widened her determination
to be always free, in spite of the world, and society, and the drone of
the busy-bodies' gossip. In her heart, the memory of Bosio had grown in
dignity, till it was solemn and imposing out of all proportion with what
the man himself had been, even as Veronica had known him. To know the
truth of what his real life had been would have shaken her own to its
foundations. But there was no fear of that; a