But that was what was taking place.

She was more lonely in mind than in heart, and without making the slightest pretence to talent or unusual cultivation, she craved a mental companionship of some sort to take up the thread where it had been broken.

She had found it unexpectedly in her new friend's letters, and she recognized it and clung to it, as to something almost necessary in her existence.

When she was ready to go up to Muro, she knew that without those letters life in such a solitude would be well nigh unsupportable, whereas, being able to look forward to them, and to answering them, her hours of idleness were already a foretasted pleasure.
She had not even told the cardinal that she was going, and she was going alone.

In Naples this seemed so incredible that after she was gone, people spontaneously invented a companion for her and assured one another that she had sent for a distant and elderly old-maid cousin as a chaperon and protectress.