em, against which he had so often struggled, to feel her warm
touch, to see the happy light in her young eyes as she sat there looking
at him, to be sure at last, beyond the half assurance of uncertain
written words.

But he was wise, and he bridled back the words that most readily of all
others would have come to his lips. Perhaps even in the midst of his new
happiness, there was the unacknowledged fear of evil chance if he should
speak too soon and put the beautiful gold to the touch while the magic
transmutation was still so dazzlingly fresh. The present was so
immeasurably better than the past, so near a perfection of its own, that
he could wait in it a while before he opened wide his arms to take in
the very whole of happiness itself, wherewith the beautiful future stood
full laden before him.

As they talked, they went over and over much that they had written to
each other during the long months of their correspondence, and at last
Veronica came back to the question she had at first asked him.

"So you think that I am sensible in living as I do," she said. "I am
glad. I value your opinion, you know."

She had perhaps never said as much as that to any one.

"You have made it what it is," he answered.

"How do you mean?" she asked quickly.

"You cannot do wrong," he replied, with his faint, far-off laugh. "If I
had read in a book, of an imaginary person, all that you have written me
of yourself, I should have said that most of it was absolutely
impossible, or wildly rash, or foolishly unwise. You know how we are all
brought up. We are nursed in the arms of tradition, we are fed on ideas
of custom--we are taken to walk, as children, by incarnate prejudice for
a nursery maid, and taught to see things that used to be, where modern
things are. What can you expect? We have not much originality by the
time we grow up."

"Yes--you know that I was educated in a convent."

"That is better than being educated at home by a priest." Gianluca
smiled again. "Besides, you are different. That is why I say that if I
have an opinion, you have made it for me. You are doing all those things
which I could not have believed in a book, and they are turning out
well. If society could see you here, it would not find it necessary to
invent a duenna to chaperon you. But it is not everybody who could do
what you have done, and succeed. I do not wonder that my mother is
astonished, and my father, too. But at the same time, since you c