any one of them,
nor how far it may lead. The little strengths of weak people are like
jagged rocks jutting up in shifting sands and changing tide, the more
dangerous to the unwary because they are few and unexpected, and no one
can tell where they lie, just below the surface. Many a brave enterprise
has gone to pieces upon the stupid, unforeseen obstinacy of a despised
weakling.

Veronica, like other people, even the very strongest, had weak points,
or moments when some points of her character were weak, which comes to
the same thing in result. She dreaded to hurt Gianluca, and since the
occasion had passed when she might have made everything clear, and
would have done so, she found it hard to decide how to act.

Taquisara had told her that the man was dying. If that were true, it
could make no difference, whether he believed that she would marry him
or not. The thought of his death was terribly painful, and she thrust it
from her; for she was not heartless, and in the days that followed their
conversation on the balcony, her affection grew to be as real and deep
as it could possibly have been for a most dearly loved brother. For her,
there had been none of those ties in which such affections live and grow
and become parts of life itself. Fatherless, motherless, without
brother, or sisters, the girl had grown up not knowing what she had to
give, and giving scarcely anything at all of what was best in her. She
was reticent and proud, and could never be attached to many people.
Bianca had been her friend, in a way, but Bianca's life was mysterious
to her, and Pietro Ghisleri had come between the two.

And now, through many months, by the intimacy of correspondence which
had suddenly turned to an intimacy of real converse in which she had not
been disappointed, she had grown--for it was a true growth--to the power
of a most devoted friendship, capable of great and lasting sacrifice. It
was a friendship, too, that was, as it were, pre-sanctified by the
rising shadow of near death, fore-hallowed by the sure suffering of its
coming end. It would be hard indeed to cut from Gianluca's heart the one
flower of his loving belief.

But then, when she sat beside him on the balcony in the shady hours, and
the great wave of life came up to her from the southern valley, she
could not believe that he was really to die. And then, she hesitated,
and she wished to do what was right and true by him, pain or no pain.
Sometimes there was