nd now, her chief companion
was to be the priest who had loved him as a friend. Possibly that last
fact had even influenced her a little in her final determination to
live at Muro, rather than in any other of four or five equally habitable
or uninhabitable places which she owned, and where she might have begun
her work under circumstances quite as favourable to success.

She had thought very little of any need she might feel for relaxation
and amusement, and she was very far from realizing what that solitude
meant, which she was seeking with so much enthusiasm. She had never yet
been as much alone as she should have liked to be, and she could not
imagine that she might possibly become tired of playing the princess in
the tower for months together, with only the company of one learned old
ecclesiastic as her sole diversion. The vision of home which she evoked
was always the same, but she did not even know whether the castle had a
room which looked down upon the little town. She imagined but a single
room; the rest was all a blank. She had been told that it was a great
old fortress, with towers and halls and courts, gloomy, grand, and
haunted by the ghosts of murdered kings and queens; but the slight
descriptions she had heard produced no prevision of the reality as
compared with what she really wanted and was sure that she should find.

She thought of Gianluca, as the carriage rolled along through the lower
hills, and she looked forward with pleasure to writing about what she
saw and expected to see. It seemed probable that she would write even
longer letters to him, now that she was to be quite alone, and she hoped
that his would be as interesting as ever. She thought again with anger
of Taquisara's extraordinary conduct, for she was positively sure that
she was not playing with his friend in any sense of the word. The very
suggestion would have been insulting, if he had made it in the most
carefully guarded and tactful language. As he had put it, it had been
nothing short of outrageous.

Gianluca must be blind indeed, she assured herself, if he fancied that
she meant more than friendship by the constant exchange of letters with
him. It might be eccentric; it might be looked upon as utterly and
unpardonably unconventional, but it could never be regarded as a
flirtation by letter. The proof of that, Veronica argued to herself, was
that both of them knew that it was nothing of the sort, a manner of
begging the question