“Why should you?” she murmured, looking up to him.  “Why should he go, after all?  This has been such a silly affair.  I wonder if that woman thought that anything could ever come between you and me?  That was what made me think she was really mad.”

“And an excellent reason,” he answered.  “Anybody must be insane who dreams of parting us two.  It seems as though a year ago I had not loved you at all.”

“I am so glad,” said Corona.  “Do you remember, last summer, on the tower at Saracinesca, I told you that you did not know what love was?”

“It was true, Corona—­I did not know.  But I thought I did.  I never imagined what the happiness of love was, nor how great it was, nor how it could enter into every thought.”

“Into every thought?  Into your great thoughts too?”

“If any thoughts of mine are great, they are so because you are the mainspring of them,” he answered.

“Will it always be so?” she asked.  “You will be a very great man some day, Giovanni; will you always feel that I am something to you?”

“Always—­more than anything to me, more than all of me together.”

“I sometimes wonder,” said Corona.  “I think I understand you better than I used to do.  I like to think that you feel how I understand you when you tell me anything.  Of course I am not clever like you, but I love you so much that just while you are talking I seem to understand everything.  It is like a flash of light in a dark room.”

Giovanni kissed her again.

“What makes you think that I shall be great, Corona?  Nobody ever thinks I am even clever.  My father would laugh at you, and say it is quite enough greatness to be born a Saracinesca.  What makes you think it?”

Corona stood up beside him and laid her delicate hand upon his thick, close-cut black hair, and gazed into his eyes.

“I know it,” she said.  “I know it, because I love you so.  A man like you must be great.  There is something in you that nobody guesses but I, that will amaze people some day—­I know it.”

“I wonder if you could tell me what it is?  I wonder if it is really there at all?” said Giovanni.

“It is ambition,” said Corona, gravely.  “You are the most ambitious man I ever knew, and nobody has found it out.”

“I believe it is true, Corona,” said Giovanni, turning away and leaning upon the chimneypiece, his head supported on one hand.  “I believe you are right.  I am ambitious:  if I only had the brains that some men have I would do great things.”

“You are wrong, Giovanni.  It is neither brains nor ambition nor strength that you lack—­it is opportunity.”

“They say that a man who has anything in him creates opportunities for himself,” answered Giovanni, rather sadly.  “I fear it is because I really have nothing in me that I can do nothing.  It sometimes makes me very unhappy to think so.  I suppose that is because my vanity is wounded.”