Everybody in the Red Book had left London. The West End was a desert, and the shrill summons of the telephone was heard no more in Mayfair. Nobody, unless it were the caretaker, was being asked to luncheon or dinner, and the only tea-parties were in the basement, where the late lettuce had not yet given place to the early muffin. Only people with urgent and onerous business were to be found in London. Lord Okehampton was shooting grouse, and Lady Okehampton ought to have been doing an after-cure in Switzerland; but "the sad state of my poor niece after her husband's ghastly death, and the legal business connected with her colossal inheritance, make it impossible for me to leave town. Much as I need a complete change, I must stay here, while that poor child wants me."

This was what Lady Okehampton wrote from her deserted house in Berkeley Square, to numerous friends, with more or less variation of phrase.

Vera's health was now the most pressing question. She had taken her bereavement with a dumb, self-contained grief, that is the most morbid and the most perilous kind of sorrow; the sorrow that kills. When questioned, pressingly but tenderly, by her aunt, she always replied in the same unresponsive manner. There was nothing the matter with her. Of course, as Aunt Mildred said, the shock had been terrible; but no doubt she would get over it in time. People always get over things. She only wanted to be left to herself. She was quite strong enough to bear her burden. No, she was not eating her heart out in solitude. It was best for her to be alone.

"You are more than kind, Aunt Mildred, and so is Susan Amphlett; but I am better sitting quietly and thinking out my life."

"But, my poor child, you are perishing visibly—just wasting away. I would rather see you in floods of tears, hysterical even, than in this hopeless state."

"What is the use of making a fuss? If tears could bring my husband back and make life what it was before his death, I would drown myself in tears. But nothing can change the past. That is what makes life terrible. The things we have done are done for ever."

Lady Okehampton trembled, first for her niece's life, and next for her sanity. And here was this stupendous fortune left to Vera for her life, and to her children after her—her children by the husband who was dead—but, in default of such children, to be divided among a horde of Italian relations—third and fourth cousins, people for whom Mario Provana might not have cared twopence—and among Roman charitable institutions—sure to be badly managed, Lady Okehampton thought.

It seemed to her that if Vera were to die, that stupendous wealth, which while she possessed it must be a factor in the position of the Disbrowes, would be absolutely thrown to the dogs. To divide that mass of riches into eights, and twelfths, and sixteenths, was in a manner to murder it. All its power and prestige would be gone, frittered away among insignificant people, who might be better off without it, as it would put a stop to laudable ambition and enterprise, and might ultimately be the cause of unmitigated harm.

"It is so sad to think there were no children," sighed Lady Okehampton into the ears of various confidential friends. "The dear man made this will shortly after his marriage, and evidently built upon having an heir—he was so absolutely devoted to my niece. I know it was a bitter disappointment for him," concluded the chieftainess of the Disbrowes, to whom Mario Provana had said no word of his inmost feelings upon that or any other subject.

Strange indeed would it have been for that strong hand to lift the curtain from that proud heart. Courteous, generous, chivalrous, he might be to the whole clan of Disbrowes. He might scatter his gold among them with a careless hand; but to scatter the secrets of his lonely life among that frivolous herd was impossible to the man who had endured a mother's dislike, a father's neglect, and the disillusions of a mariage de convenance, without one hour of self-betrayal.

Vera was childless, and on her frail thread of life hung Mario Provana's millions.

Lady Okehampton told herself this in the watches of the night, and told herself that something must be done. It was all very well for Vera to declare that there was nothing the matter with her, while it was visible to the naked eye that the poor child was fading away, in an atrophy of mind and body.

"She will either die or go mad," said Lady Okehampton, and the alternative offered visions of a conseil de famille, doctors' certificates, and that rabble of fourth and fifth cousins tearing their prey.

Long and confidential talks with Mrs. Manby, the housekeeper, and Louison, the maid, had revealed the desperate state of their mistress's health.

"No, my lady, she doesn't complain," asserted Mrs Manby. "I'm afraid it's all the worse because she won't complain. But she can't sleep, and she can't eat. Sedgewick knows what her meals are like: just pretending, that's all; and Louison says that, go into her mistress's room when she will, in the middle of the night or in the early morning, she's always lying awake, sometimes reading, sometimes staring at the sky above the window sash, but asleep—never! And it isn't for want of taking things, for she has tried every drug you can put a name to."

"Does the doctor prescribe them?"

"He used to send her things, in the first few weeks after—the funeral. But she made him believe that she was quite well, and was sleeping and eating as usual, and he left off coming. And then Lady Susan Amphlett brought her tabloids—always the newest thing out. But they've never done her any good. It's the mind that's wrong, my lady."

"She was absolutely devoted to Mr. Provana," sighed Lady Okehampton.

"No doubt, my lady."

"And she can't get over her loss."

"No, my lady."

Susan Amphlett was of Aunt Mildred's opinion. Something must be done, and it must be done quickly, before any of those Roman cousins could appear upon the scene, prying and questioning, and hinting at a commission of lunacy. Things had come to a perilous pass, when Mrs. Manby, the housekeeper, could talk of her mistress's mind as the seat of the mischief. People who go out of their minds seldom take a long time about it, Lady Susan urged. "It's generally touch and go."

Lady Okehampton waited for no permission, but marched into her niece's room one dark September afternoon with the fashionable nerve specialist at her heels, the bland elderly physician from Cavendish Square, whom nobody in Mayfair had even heard of till he had entered upon his seventh decade, and who had languished at the wrong end of Harley Street for a quarter of a century, before the great world had made the remarkable discovery that he was the one man in London who could cure one of everything.

He was kind and sensible, and really clever; but the great world loved him most because he had all the new names for old diseases at the tip of his tongue, and had the delightful manner which implied that the patient to whom he was talking was the one patient whose life he considered worth saving.

"He really does think about you when he's feeling your pulse," said a dowager. "He ain't totting up last night's winnings at bridge all the time. He does really think, don't you know."

Dr. Selwyn Tower, as he held Vera's wasted wrist in his broad, soft hand, looked as serious as if the fate of a nation were at stake. Indeed, he had been told that millions were in jeopardy, and in the modern mind the destinies of big fortunes are as serious as the rise and fall of peoples.

The physician asked no troublesome questions; but he contrived to keep Vera in conversation—on indifferent subjects—for about a quarter of an hour, her aunt joining in occasionally with sympathetic nothings; and by the end of that time he had made up his mind about the case, or at least about his immediate treatment of the case. He might have thoughts that went deeper and farther—but those could be held in abeyance. The thing to be done was to save this fragile form, which was obviously perishing.

A rest cure—nothing else would be of any use—an uncompromising rest cure. Six weeks of solitary confinement in the care of a resident doctor and a couple of highly trained nurses.

Lady Okehampton anticipated a struggle, remembering how resolutely Vera had resisted this line of treatment three months before; but her niece surprised her by offering no vehement opposition.

"There is absolutely nothing the matter with me," she said, "but if it will please you, Aunt Mildred, I will do as Dr. Tower advises."

"Nothing the matter! And you neither eat nor sleep! Is that nothing?"

"Who told you that I can't sleep?"

"My dear lady, your eyes tell us only too plainly. Insomnia has unmistakable symptoms," said the doctor.

"Yes, it is true," Vera answered wearily. "I seem to have lost the faculty of sleep. It is a habit one soon loses. I lie staring at the daylight, and wondering what it is like to lose count of time."

And then, after a little more doctor's talk, soothing, and rather meaningless, she asked abruptly:

"What time of year is it?"

"Dear child," exclaimed Lady Okehampton, "can you ask?"

"Oh, I have left off writing letters and reading newspapers, and I forget dates. I know the days are getting shorter, because the dawn is so long coming when I lie awake."

"We are in the middle of September," said the doctor, "a charming month for country air—neither too hot nor too cold—the golden mean."

"And in six weeks it will be the end of October, and I can go to Rome for the winter!"

"You could not do better. We shall build up your constitution in those six weeks. You will be another woman when you leave Sussex."

"But, my dearest Vera," protested her aunt, "you can never think of a winter alone in that enormous villa. You will die of ennui."

"No, no, Aunt Mildred, I love Rome. The very atmosphere of the place is life to me. I am not afraid of being alone."

Dr. Tower shot a significant look at her ladyship, which silenced remonstrance, and no more was said.

Two days later Vera found herself on a windy hill in Sussex, under the dominion of the house-doctor and two nurses, and almost as much exposed to the elements as King Lear on the heights near Dover. An eider-down coverlet and a hot-water bottle made the only difference. Lady Okehampton, having sacrificed her own cure to her niece's, went with a mind at ease to join her husband in Yorkshire; an arrangement almost without precedent in their domestic annals.