hich gives all it has to any one who
seems to be in trouble--the charity that is universal, and easily
imposed upon, and that exists spontaneously and, as it were, for its own
sake, in certain warm-hearted people--an indiscriminate love of giving
to the poor, the overflow of a heart so full of kindness that it would
be kind to a withering flower or a half-dead tree, rather than not
expend itself at all. And so, seeing the great things that were done by
Veronica in Muro, and secretly giving of his very little where she gave
very much, Don Teodoro grew daily to be more and more happy in the
satisfaction of his strongest instinct; and little by little he, also,
came to look upon his princess as the incarnation of a good power come
to illuminate his darkness and to lift his people out of degradation to
human estate.

Veronica was happy too. There is a sort of exhilaration and daily
surprise in the first use of real power in any degree, and she enjoyed
her own sensations to the fullest extent. When she was alone, she wrote
about them to Gianluca, giving him what was almost a daily chronicle of
her new life, and waiting anxiously for the answers to her letters which
came with almost perfect regularity for some time after her own arrival
at Muro.

They pleased her, too, though the note of sadness was more accentuated
in them, as time went on and spring ran into summer. He had hoped,
perhaps, that she might tire of her solitude and come down to Naples, if
only for a few days; or at least, that something might happen to break
what promised to be a long separation. He longed for a sight of her, and
said so now and then, for letter-writing could not fill up the aching
emptiness she had left in his already empty life. He had not her
occupations and interests to absorb his days and make each hour seem too
short, and, moreover, he loved her, whereas she was not at all in love
with him.

Then, a little later, there was a tone of complaint in what he wrote,
which suddenly irritated her. He told her that his life was dreary and
tiresome, and that the people about him did not understand him. She
answered that he should occupy himself, that he should find something to
do and do it, and that she herself never had time enough in the day for
all she undertook. It was the sort of letter which a very young woman
will sometimes write to a man whose existence she does not understand,
a little patronizing in tone and superior with the self-ass