ou know, if any one does. I used to write you all
about what I meant to do while I was still living with Bianca, and you
know that I have begun to carry out most of my ideas. Yesterday
afternoon, while you were resting, your father and mother and I had tea
together, and she found out for the first time that I had no companion.
You should have seen her face! And then, when I tried to explain, she
got the impression at once that I meant to live here in a sort of
amateur convent, surrounded by women. I think she rather liked the idea.
It seemed to settle her disturbed prejudices a little. Of course--it
must seem stranger to people who all live in the same way as she does.
Oh! how glad I am that we can talk about it, you and I!"

Again she laughed happily. To Gianluca, as his eyes met hers, it seemed
as though a great wave of the huge, exuberant life that filled the
full-blossoming world that day had rolled up out of the broad valley to
his feet and were lifting him and penetrating him and sweeping its hot
tide through the ebb of his failing blood.

"Yes," he answered her. "To be able to talk at last--at last, after so
much waiting, that was only half talking."

He sighed gently, and his hand stroked the grey shawl on his knees,
smoothing it first in one way and then backwards in the other. She
watched him, and thought that she had never seen a hand so thin.

"We shall never go back to the old way, shall we?" he asked, before she
spoke again.

"I hope not!" she answered. "It was so absurd, sometimes. Do you
remember at Bianca's house--"

"The night before you left? When I forgot my stick?"

"Yes; but before that. You seemed to think that there was to be no more
writing because I was coming here."

"Of course--that is, I supposed that it might make a difference--"

"And then you asked me. You should have seen your face! I can remember
it now. It changed all at once."

"It is no wonder. You changed the whole future with one word. You
seemed really to want my letters much more than I had imagined that you
did."

As by the quick lifting of a dividing veil, all the awkward little
incidents and memories of constraint had suddenly become parts of the
much larger and more pleasant recollection of their semi-secret
intimacy, and in blending with the broader picture the little ones
somehow ceased to have anything disagreeable in them, and instead, there
was a touch of humour and a suggestion of laughter each time that th