It was a little less than three weeks after the meeting in the house of silence; but to Vera the interval seemed an endless procession of slow, grey days and fevered nights—nights of intolerable length, in which she listened to the beating of the blood against her skull, now slow and rhythmical, now tempestuous and irregular—endless nights in which sleep seemed the most unlikely thing that could happen, a miracle for which she had left off hoping. In all that time she had heard no more of Mrs. Rutherford, though the daily chronicle that kept note of every stranger in Rome still printed her name among the inmates of the Hotel Marguerita.

She was angry and unforgiving. Unhappy mother! Unhappy son!

Two pairs of horses had to be exercised daily, but Vera had no orders for the stables. That monotonous parade in the Pincio, which every other woman of means in Rome made a part of her daily life, had no attraction for Signor Provana's widow. The villa gardens, funereal in their winter foliage of ilex and arbutus, sufficed for relief from the long hours within four walls. Wrapped in her sable coat, with the wind blowing upon her uncovered head, she paced the long terraces for hours on end, or sat like a statue on the marble bench that had been dug out of the ruins of imperial baths. But though she spent half her days in the gardens she took no interest in them. She never stopped to watch the gardeners at work upon the flower-beds, never questioned them about their preparations for the spring. Thousands of bulbs were being planted daily, but she never wanted to learn what resurrection of vivid colour would come from those brown balls which the men were dropping into the earth. She walked about like a corpse alive! The men almost shrank from her as she passed them, as if they had seen a ghost.

She could never forget that last meeting with her lover. The last—the very last. She sat with her arms folded on the marble balustrade, and her head resting on the folded arms, with her face hidden from the clear, cold light of a December afternoon.

Her gaze was turned inward; and it was only with that inward gaze that she saw things distinctly. The outside world was blurred and dim, but the pictures memory made were vivid.

She saw Claude's agonised look, saw the melancholy eyes gazing at her: the yearning love, the despairing renunciation.

Mrs. Rutherford had called her cruel, but was not the cruelty far greater that submitted her to that heart-rending ordeal?

To sit brooding thus, with her arms upon the cold marble, had been so much a habit with her of late, that in these melancholy reveries she had often lost count of time, till the sound of some convent bell startled her as it told the lateness of the hour, or till the creeping cold of sundown awoke her with a shiver. In that city of the Church there were many bells—all with their particular call to prayer, and she could have told the progress of the day and night without the help of a clock. Now it was the bell of the TrinitÀ del Monte, for the office of Benediction, distant and silvery sweet in the clear air. It was a warning to go back to the house—yet she did not stir. Solitude here, with the cold wind blowing upon her, and the twitter of birds among the branches, was better than the atmosphere of those silent rooms.

She raised her head at the sound of a footstep, not the leisurely tread of one of the gardeners, heavy and slow. This step was light and rapid, so rapid that before she had time to wonder, it had stopped close beside her, and two strong arms were holding her, and quick, sobbing breath was fluttering her hair.

"Don't be frightened! Vera, my angel, my beloved!"

She tried to release herself, tried to stand upright, but the passionate arms held her to the passionate heart.

"Claude, are you mad?"

"No. Madness is over. Sanity has come back. I am yours again, my beloved, yours as I was that night—before a great horror parted us. I am all your own—your lover—your husband, whatever you will. The miserable slave you saw in the monastery is dead. I am yours, and only yours. I have no separate existence. I want no other heaven! Heaven is here, in your arms. Nothing else matters."

"My God! Have you left the monastery!"

"For ever. I bore it till last night—but that was a night of hell. I told the Superior this morning that I was not of the stuff that makes a martyr or a monk. He was horrified. To him I seemed a son of the devil. Well, I will worship Satan sooner than lose you. I am your lover, Vera—nothing else in this sublunary world. 'We'll jump the life to come.'"

She clung to him in the ecstasy of reunion, and their lips met in a kiss more tragic than Francesca's and Paolo's, for their guilt was yet to come; while with Vera and her lover guilt had been consummated.

Presently, with a sudden revulsion, she snatched herself from his arms, and stood looking at him reproachfully.

"Oh, my dearest, why did you not stand firm? Think how little this poor life of ours means compared with that which comes after."

"I leave the after-life to the illuminated—to Symeon and his following. I want nothing but the woman I love. Here or hereafter, for me there is nothing else. Vera, forget that I ever tried to forsake you—that I ever set my soul's ransom above my thoughts of you. It was a short madness, a cowardly endeavour. Forget it all, as I shall from this hour. Here are you and I—in this little world which is the only one we know—with just a few more years of youth and love. Let us make the most of them; and when the fire of life dies down, when these fierce heart-throbs are over, we will give our fading years to penitence and prayer."

This is what happens when a man of Claude Rutherford's temperament puts his hand to the plough.