e able to order the carriage
and slip out alone as she had done the first time. She had meant to go
out on foot with her maid, and then to take a cab in the street and
drive to the villa. But in such weather as this she could not do such a
thing without exciting remark. It was a week-day, and there were no
masses to hear, as an excuse, by the time she was dressed.

She watched herself in the glass, while her maid was doing her hair. The
dull light of the rainy morning made her own face look grey and sallow.
She had not slept very well, and her eyes were heavy, she thought. The
glaring whiteness of the thing she had thrown over her shoulders while
her hair was being brushed made her look worse. She had little vanity
about her appearance, as a rule, but on that particular day she would
have been glad to look her best.

Not that she at all believed that Gianluca was dying for her; but he was
certainly in love with her. Of that she felt sure, for she could not
suppose that Taquisara himself was not convinced of the fact. Nor had
she the smallest beginning of a tender sentimentality about the
fair-haired young man. Nevertheless, if she was to meet him, she did not
wish to be positively ugly, as she seemed to be to herself when she
looked into the mirror, facing the dulness of the rain-beaten window.
Whether she herself was ever to care for him or not, she somehow did not
wish to disappoint him by her appearance, and the undefined fear lest
she might affected her spirits. Then, before she had quite finished
dressing, Matilde Macomer knocked at the door and came in. She was
looking far worse than Veronica, and from the absence of colour in her
face, her eyes seemed to be more near together than ever. Her appearance
made Veronica feel a little more hopeful, and the young girl said to
herself that after all the light of a rainy day was unbecoming to every
one, and much more so to a woman of forty than to a girl of twenty.

She did not wish to be alone with her aunt if she could help it, and she
promptly invented several little things for her maid to do, in order to
keep the latter in the room. The maid was a thin, dark woman of middle
age, from the mountains. She was a widow, and her husband had been an
under-steward on the Serra estate at Muro, who had been brutally
murdered five years earlier by half a dozen peasants whose rents had
been raised, when he endeavoured to exact payment. The rents had been
raised by Gregorio Maco