The six weeks' captivity on the hill in Sussex had been a success, and Vera was able to leave England before the first November fog descended upon Portland Place. She was in Rome, in the city where she had spent the happiest period of her life—the time in which she had first known what it meant for a woman to be adored, and lovely, and immeasurably rich. There she had first known the power of wealth and the influence of beauty; for her husband's position and her own attractions had assured her an immediate social success, and had made her a star in Roman society during her first season, while, over and above all other graces, she had the charm of novelty. But it was not the memory of social triumphs or of gratified vanity that was with her as she sat alone in the too spacious saloon, or roamed with languid step through other rooms as spacious and as lonely.

Sympathy had flowed in upon her from all her Roman acquaintances, and acquaintances of divers nationalities, the birds of passage, American, French, Spanish, German. Cards and little notes had descended upon the villa like a summer hailstorm; and she had responded with civility, but with no uncertain tone. Her mourning was to be a long mourning; and her seclusion was to be absolute. She had come to live a solitary life in her villa and gardens, to wander among ruins and steep herself in the poetry of the city. She had come not to the Rome of the present, but to the Rome of the past. This was how she explained her life to the officious people who wanted to force distractions upon her; and who in secret were already hatching matrimonial schemes by which the Provana millions might be made to infuse new life into princely races that were perishing in financial atrophy.

The Villa Provana was on high ground, beyond the Porta del Popolo, and the view from the gardens commanded the roofs and towers and cupolas of the city, and the dominating mass of the great basilica, which dwarfs all other monuments, and reduces papal Rome, with its heterogeneous roofs and turrets, steeples and obelisks, to a mere foreground for that one stupendous dome.

Day after day, in those short winter afternoons, Vera stood on the terrace in front of the villa, leaning languidly against the marble balustrade, and watching the evening mists rising slowly over the city, and the grey of the great dome gradually deepening to purple, while the golden light in the west grew more intense, and orange changed to crimson.

She was never tired of gazing at that incomparable prospect. How often in her honeymoon year she had stood there, with Mario Provana at her side, questioning him with a childish delight, and making him point out and explain every tower and every cupola, the classic, the papal, the old and the new; churches, palaces, public buildings, municipal and royal, picture-galleries, museums, fountains! It was there, as an idolised young wife, with her husband's strong arm supporting her, as she leant against him, in the pleasant fatigue after a day of pleasure, that she had learnt to know Rome, and that she had discovered how dearly the hard man of business loved the city of his birth. It was there he had told her what Victor Emanuel and Cavour—the soldier and the statesman—had done for Italy; and how that which had been but a geographical expression, a patchwork of petty states—for the most part under foreign rulers—had become the name of a great nation in the van of progress.

She thought of him now, evening after evening, in the unbroken silence and solitude of the long terrace on the crown of the hill, and only a little lower than the terrace on the Pincio. She looked backward across the arid desert of her five years of society under Disbrowe influences, five years of life that seemed worthless and joyless compared with that year of a happiness she had almost forgotten, till her husband's death carried all her thoughts back to the past: to the time when she had given him love for love; to the days that she could think of without remorse.

"Oh, God, if I had died at the end of that year, what a happy life mine would have been!"

She thought of the tomb on the Campagna, the splendid monument of a husband's love, near which she had sat in her carriage with Mario to watch the gathering of a gay crowd, and the flash of red coats against the clear blue of a December day, the hounds trotting lightly in front of huntsman and whip, the women in their short habits, patent-leather boots flashing against new saddles; men on well-bred hunters; the whole picture so modern and so trivial against the fortress tomb with its mystery of a distant past—only a name to suggest the story of two lives.

"If I had only died then," she thought.

To have ended her life in that year of gladness, innocent, beloved, while all her world was lovely in the freshness of life's morning. To have died then, before the blight of disillusion or the taint of sinful thought had touched her, to have passed out of the world, beloved and worthy of love, and to have been laid to rest in the cemetery at San Marco, beside her girl friend. Ah, what a happy destiny! And now what was to be her doom? A cold breath touched her as she leaned over the balustrade, with her hands clasped over her eyes, a cold breath that thrilled her and made her tremble. It was only the cooler wind of evening, breathing across the gathering shadows, but it startled her by the suggestion of a human presence.

She rose from the marble bench where she had been sitting since the sun began to sink behind the umbrella pines on a hill in the distance, and while the far-reaching level of the Campagna began to look like the blue waters of a sea in the lessening light, and walked slowly back to the villa, by the long terrace, and under a pergola where the last roses showered their petals upon her as she passed.

The lamps were lighted in the saloon, and logs were burning in the vast fireplace at the end of the room, a distant glow and brightness, a pleasing spot of colour in a melancholy picture, but of not much avail for warmth in a room of fifty feet by twenty-five, with a ceiling twenty feet high. But the comfort of the villa was not dependent upon smouldering olive logs or spluttering pine-cones. There was a hot-water system, the most expensive and the best, for supplying all those palatial rooms with an equable and enervating atmosphere.

There was a letter lying on Vera's book-table, a table that always stood by her armchair at one side of the monumental chimneypiece. This spot was her own, her island in that ocean of space. This chair was large enough to absorb her, and when she was sitting in it, the room looked empty, and a servant had to come near her table before he could be sure she was there.

She took up the letter, and looked at the address wonderingly. It had not come by post. There was something familiar in the writing. It reminded her of Claude's; and then, in a moment, she remembered. The letter was from Mrs. Rutherford. Little notes had been exchanged between them in past years, notes of invitation from Vera, replies, mostly courteous refusals, from the elder lady.

Mrs. Rutherford must be in Rome. Strange! Had she, too, come to winter there?

The address was of one of the smaller and quieter hotels in the great city, a house unknown to the tourist, English or American: a house patronised only by what are called "nice people."

Trouble! What could be Mrs. Rutherford's trouble? Had she anything in this world to be glad or sorry about, except her son?

The letter gave Vera a night of agitation and feverish dreams, and she spent the hour before noon pacing up and down the great room, deadly pale in the dense blackness of her long crape gown.

It was not five minutes past the hour when Mrs. Rutherford was announced. She, too, was pale, and she, too, wore black, but not mourning.

"You are kind to let me see you," she said, clasping Vera's hand.

"How could I refuse? I am so sorry you are in trouble. Is it—" her voice became tremulous, "is it anything about Claude? Is he ill?"

"No, he is not ill, unless it is in mind. But the trouble is about him, a new and unexpected trouble. A thunderbolt!"

The terror in Vera's face startled her. She thought the frail figure would drop at her feet in a dead faint, and she caught her by the arm.

"I think you may help me. You and he were great friends, pals, Susan Amphlett called you."

"Yes, we were pals. He was so good to me at Disbrowe, years and years ago."

"Yes, I know. He has often talked of that time. Well, you were great friends; and a young man will sometimes open his mind more to a woman friend than he will to his mother. Did Claude ever talk to you of his Church, of his remorse for his neglect of his religion, of his wanting to give up the world, to end a useless life in a monastery?"

"Never."

"I thought not. It is a sudden caprice; there is no real strength of purpose in it. He is disgusted and disappointed. He has made a failure of his life, and he is angry with, himself, and sick to death of Society. Such a man cannot go on being trivial for ever. A life without purpose can but end in disgust. My poor child, you are shivering, and can hardly stand. Let us go nearer the fire. Sit down, and let us talk quietly—and be kind, and bear with a foolish old woman, who sees the joy of her life slipping away from her."

The visitor's quick eye had noticed the great armchair and book-table by the hearth, and knew that it was Vera's place. She led her there, made her sit down, and took a chair by her side.

"Now we shall be warm and comfortable, and can look my trouble in the face."

"Tell me all about it," Vera said quietly, with her hand in Mrs. Rutherford's.

The wave of agitation had passed. She spoke slowly, but her voice was no longer tremulous.

"I dare say, if you have ever thought of me in the past, you have given me credit for being a strong-minded woman."

"Claude has told me of your strength of will—the right kind of strength."

"And now I have to confess myself to you, as weak, unstable, inconsistent; caring for my son's love for me more than I care for his eternal welfare."

"No, no, I can never believe that."

"But you will believe it when I tell you that he has taken the first step towards separating himself for ever from this sinful world, and giving the rest of his life to God; and that I am here in this city, here pleading with you, to try to change his purpose and win him back to the world."

"Oh!" said Vera, with a faint cry. "Has he made up his mind?"

"He thinks he has. But oh, what shall I do without him? It is horrible, selfish, unworthy; but I can only think of myself and my own desolate old age. Only a few years more, perhaps, only a few years of solitude and mourning; but my mind and heart rise in rebellion against Fate. I cannot bear my life without him. Again and again I have urged him to remember the faith in which he was reared; I have tried to awaken him to the call of the Church; I have begged Father Hammond to use his influence to rekindle the fervour of religion that made my son's boyish mind so lovely: and now when he has gone beyond my prayers, and wants to renounce this sinful world, I am a weak, miserable woman, and my despairing cry is to call him back to the life he has grown weary of. Do you not despise me, Vera?"

"No, no. I can understand. It is natural for a mother to feel as you feel; but, all the same, I think if he has made up his mind to retire into a monastery, it is your duty to let him go. Think what it is for a man to spend his last years in reconciling himself with God. Think of the peace that may come with self-sacrifice. Think what it is to escape out of this sinful world—into a place of silence and prayer, and to know that one's sins are forgiven."

"He has no sins that need the sacrifice of half a life. He has been the dearest of sons, the kindest of friends, honourable, generous, straightforward. Why should he shut himself in a monastery to find forgiveness for trivial sins, and neglect of religious forms? He can lead a new and better life in the world of action, where he can be of use to his fellow-men. Even Father Hammond has never advised him to turn monk. He can worship God, and lead the Christian life, without renouncing all that is lovely in the world God made for us."

Vera listened with a steadfast face, and her tones were calm and decided when she replied.

"Dear Mrs. Rutherford, the heart knoweth its own bitterness. I think, the better you love your son the less you should come between him and a resolve that must give him peace, if it can never give him happiness."

For the first time since Mrs. Rutherford had been with her, Vera's eyes filled with tears, tears that overflowed and streamed down the colourless cheeks, and that it needed all her strength to check.

"You surprise me," the elder woman cried passionately, flinging away the hand that she had been holding. "You surprise me. I came to you for sympathy, sure that I should find it, believing that you cared for my son almost as much as I care for him. You were his chosen friend—he devoted half his days to you. The closeness of your friendship made malicious people say shameful things, and has given me many an unhappy hour; and now, at this crisis of his life, when he is bent upon burying himself alive in a monastery—entering some severe order, for whose rule of hardship and deprivation he is utterly unfit, a kind of life that will break his heart and bring him to an early grave—you preach to me of his finding peace in those dreary walls—peace—as if he were the worst of sinners."

"No, no, you don't understand me. Father Hammond has told me about the monastic life—the Benedictines, La Trappe. He has told me what happiness has been found in that life of solitude and prayer by those who have renounced the world."

"Was it you who inspired this extraordinary resolve?"

"I? No, indeed. I knew nothing of it till you told me."

"What? He could take such a step without consulting you, without confiding in you—his closest friend?"

"Was it likely that he would tell me, if he did not tell his mother?"

"He told me nothing till he had come here; to make a retreat in a monastery; to give himself time for meditation and thought, before he took any decisive step. He is here in Rome, and has been here for some time. My first knowledge of his decision was a letter he sent me from here. Such an unsatisfactory letter, giving no adequate reason for his resolve, only vague words about his weariness of life and the world."

"What else could he say? That must always be the reason. One gets tired of everything—and then one turns to God—and a life of prayer seems best. It is death in life; but it may mean peace."

"Vera, I was never more shocked and disappointed. I thought you loved him when love was sin. I thought you loved him at the peril of your soul; and now, when a terrible calamity has left you free to do what you like with the rest of your life, now, when however deeply you may mourn for your husband's awful death, and grieve over any sins of omission in your married life, yet there must needs be the far-off thought of years to come, when without self-reproach, you may give yourself to a lover who in years and temperament would be your natural companion——"

"There has been no such thought in my mind," Vera said coldly. "I shall never cease to mourn for Mario Provana's death. I have nothing else in the world to live for."

"My poor girl. It is only natural that you should feel like that. I did wrong to speak of the future. You have passed through a horrible ordeal, and it may be long before you can forget. But you are too kind not to be sorry for a mother who is threatened with the loss of all that she has of joy and comfort in this world."

"I am very sorry for you," Vera said, with a mechanical air, as if her thoughts were far away.

"Then you will help me?" Mrs. Rutherford cried eagerly.

"How can I help you?"

"You can appeal to my son. You may have more influence over him than I. I believe you have more influence," with a touch of bitterness. "However indifferent you may be, and may have always been to him, I know that he was devoted to you, that you could have led him, if you had cared to lead him. And he will listen to you now, he will have pity upon me, if you plead for me, if you tell him what it is for a mother to part with the son of nearly forty years' cherishing, who represents all her life on earth, past, present, and to come. I cannot live without him, Vera. I thought that I was strong in faith, and patience, and resignation, till this trouble came upon me. I thought that I was a religious woman; but now I know that the God I worshipped was of clay, and that when I prayed and tried to lift my thoughts to Heaven it was only of my son that I thought, only for his welfare that I prayed. Help me, Vera, if you have a heart that can love and sympathise with another's love. Plead with him, tell him how few the years are for a woman of my age; and that there will be time enough for him to bury himself alive in a monastery when I am at rest. His dedication of those later years will not be less precious in the sight of God, because he has deferred the sacrifice for his mother's sake."

"I cannot think that he will listen to me, if he has not yielded to you; I know he loves you dearly."

"He did love me—never was there a better son. But he changed all at once. It was as if something had broken his life. But I think you can melt his heart. He will understand my grief better when it is brought home to him by another. I am to see him to-morrow afternoon, and I shall be allowed to take you with me. Will you come?"

The entreaty was so insistent, so agonising, that Vera could only bend her head in mute acquiescence.

Mrs. Rutherford threw her arms round the frail figure and strained it to her breast.

"My dearest girl, I knew you would have pity upon me. I will call for you to-morrow at half-past two. The house is on the hill, beyond the Medici Villa—a lovely spot—but to me, though it is only a place of probation, it seems like a grave. Vera!" with a sudden passion, "if I thought that this step were for his happiness, I believe I could submit; but when I parted with him last week his face was the face of despair. How changed, oh, my God, how changed!"