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 them, 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."