quiet smile.

But Angela missed her father constantly, not understanding that he had
systematically forced her to look to him as the judge and master of
her existence, and she wondered a little why she almost longed for his
grave nod, and his stern frown of disapproval, and even for the daily
and hourly reproof under which she had so often chafed. Madame Bernard
had been installed in the palace since the day of the fatal accident,
and she was kindness personified, full of consideration and
forethought; yet the girl was very lonely and miserable from morning
till night, and when she slept she dreamed of the dead Knight of
Malta's face, of the yellow light of the wax torches, and the voices
of the priests.

On the fourth day a letter came from Giovanni, the first she had ever
received from him. She did not even know his handwriting, and she
looked at the signature before reading the note to see who had written
to her so soon. When she understood that it was he, a flood of
sunshine broke upon her gloom. The bright morning sun had indeed been
shining through the window for an hour, but she had not known it till
then.

It was not a love-letter. He used those grammatically illogical but
superfinely courteous forms which make high Italian a mystery to
strangers who pick up a few hundred words for daily use and dream that
they understand the language. He used the first person for himself,
but spoke of her in the third singular; he began with: 'Most gentle
Donna Angela,' and he signed his full name at the end of a formal
phrase setting forth his profoundly respectful homage. She would have
been much surprised and perhaps offended if he had expressed himself
in any more familiar way. Brought up as she had been under the most
old-fashioned code in Europe when at home, and under the frigid rule
of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart when she was at school, any
familiarity of language seemed to her an outrage on good manners, and
might even be counted a sin if she condescended to it in speaking with
a man who was not yet her husband. She had been made to address her
father in the third person feminine singular ever since she had
learned to talk, precisely as Giovanni wrote to her; and if she prayed
to the Deity with the less formal second person plural, this was
doubtless because the Italian prayers had been framed in less refined
and courteous times than her own.

In spite of his stiff grammar, however, Severi managed to write thi