ey
compared what they had said and done with what they had written and
felt. It was no wonder that the fascination grew on Gianluca with every
dancing beat of the happy man's pulse.

They talked on, and in the way she talked Veronica showed that while her
character had grown in three-quarters of a year from girlhood to
womanhood, and from womanhood to the half-imperial masculinity of a
dictatress, her heart was younger than the youngest, was as unsuspicious
of itself as a child's, ready to give itself in an innocent generosity
which could not conceive that giving might mean being taken, or be as
like it as to deceive such a willing, love-sick man as poor Gianluca.
She did not say that she loved him, she did not love him, she did not
wish him to think that she could love him. Why should he think that she
did? Surely, that he loved her, or thought so, could make no difference.

She was so very young, under her armour of despotism, that she might
almost have loved him, as she had all but loved Bosio, had there been
anything to love. But there was not. Gianluca was a shadow, an
unmaterial being, a thought--anything ethereal, but not a man.

The dream-driven ghost of her dead betrothed was ten times more human
and real than Gianluca was to her now, with his white angel's face and
misty hands that seemed to hang weightless in the air before him when he
moved them. There was more of living humanity in the fast fainting echo
of Bosio's last words to her than in Gianluca's clear, sweet tones. If
he should tell her that he loved her now, she should perhaps not even
blush; for his whole being was sifted and refined and distilled, as the
very spirit of star dust, in which there was nothing left of that sweet,
earthly living, breathing, dying, loving flesh and blood without which
love itself is but a scholar's word, and passion means but a vague,
spiritual suffering, in which there is neither hope of joy to come nor
memory of any past.

Yet Gianluca breathed, and was a human man, and loved her, and he would
have been strangely surprised had he suddenly seen into her heart and
understood that she looked upon him as though he were a being out of
another world. The moment when she had first laid her hand upon his had
been the supremest of his life yet lived, and all the moments since had
been as supremely happy. It was something which he had not dared to
hope--to hear her speaking as though there had never been that veil
between th