Just two years after the sudden close of Mr. Rutherford's retreat there was a quiet wedding in Father Hammond's chapel—a bride without bridesmaids, a marriage without music, a bride in a pale grey gown and a black hat, with just a sprinkling of the Disbrowe clan to keep her in countenance. Three stately aunts, Lady Okehampton being by far the most human of the three, and their three noble husbands, with Lady Susan Amphlett, vivacious as ever, and immensely pleased with her friend.

From a conversational point of view she had been living upon this marriage all through the little season of November fog and small dinner-parties at restaurants or at home. She knew so much more than anybody else, and what she knew was what everybody wanted to know. She discussed the subject at Ritz's, at Claridge's, at the Savoy, at the Carlton, and seemed to have something fresh to say at each place of entertainment. There was more variety in her information than even in the hors d'oeuvres, which rise in a crescendo of novelty in unison with the newness of the hotel.

People wondered they had not married sooner, since, of course, everybody knew it must end in marriage.

Susie shrugged her pretty shoulders, and flashed her diamond necklace at the company.

"The sweet thing is exaltÉe. She is one of Francis Symeon's flock; and she thought respect for her husband obliged her to wait two years. She only left off her mourning last week."

"But considering that she was carrying on with Rutherford years before Provana's death?"

"You none of you understand her. Their friendship was purely platonic. She and I were like sisters, and I was in and out of her house just as Claude was. There never was a more innocent attachment. I used to call them Paul and Virginia."

"I should think Paolo and Francesca would be more like it," murmured one of the company.

Susie shook her fan at him.

"You men will never believe in a virtuous friendship. However, there they are—absolutely devoted to each other. They will be the happiest couple in London, and they mean to entertain a great deal."

"Then I hope they are on the look-out for a pearl among chefs. People won't go to Portland Place to eat second-rate dinners."

"Provana's dinners were admirable, and his wines the finest in London."

Then there came the question of settlements. How much of her millions had Mrs. Provana settled upon Rutherford?

"I don't think there has been any settlement."

"The more fool he," muttered a matter-of-fact guardsman. "What's the use of marrying a rich woman if you don't get some of the stuff?"

"Don't I tell you they are like Paul and Virginia?" said Susie.

The Provana murder had died out long before this as a source of interest and wonder. It had flourished and faded like a successful novel, or a play that takes the town by storm one year and is forgotten the year after. The Provana mystery had gone to the dust-heap of old things. Slowly and gradually people had resigned themselves to the knowledge that this murder must take its place among the long list of crimes that are never to be punished by the law.

Romantic people clung to their private solutions of the tragical enigma. These were as sure of the identity of the murderer as if they had seen him red-handed. The quiet marriage in the Roman Catholic chapel revived the interest in the half-forgotten crime, and Lady Susan had the additional kudos of a close association with the event.

"Vera and I were together at Lady Fulham's ball within two or three hours of that poor fellow's death," she told her friends at a Savoy supper-table. "I never saw her look so lovely, in one of her mermaid frocks, and a necklace and girdle of single diamonds that flashed like water-drops. Other people's jewels looked vulgar compared with hers. She was in wonderful spirits, stayed late, and danced all the after supper waltzes. She was fey."

"Rutherford was there, of course?" said someone.

"Of course," echoed Susan; "why shouldn't he be there? Everybody was there."

"But everybody couldn't waltz or sit out with Madame Provana all the evening, as I heard he did," remarked a middle-aged matron, fixing Susan with her long-handled eyeglass.

"Why shouldn't they waltz? They are cousins, and have always been pals, and they waltz divinely. To watch them is to understand what Shakespeare meant by the poetry of motion. Everything Vera does is a poem. Every frock she wears shows that she is a poet's daughter. And now they are married, and are going to be utterly happy," concluded Susie with conviction.

The world in general does not relish that idea of idyllic happiness—especially in the case of multi-millionaires. It is consoling—when one is not a millionaire—to think of some small counterbalance to that overweening good luck, some little rift within the lute.

A cynic, as cold and sour as the aspic he was eating, shrugged his shoulders.

"If I had a daughter I was fond of, I don't think I would trust the chances of her happiness to Claude Rutherford," he said quietly.

"Claude is quite adorable," said a fourteen-stone widow, whose opulent shoulders and triple necklaces had been the central point of the public gaze at the theatre that evening.

"Much too adorable to make one woman happy. A man of that kind has to spread himself. It must be diffused light, not the concentrated glow of the domestic hearth," said the cynic, smiling at the bubbles in his glass.

Everybody found something to say about Vera and her husband. Certainly their behaviour since Provana's death had been exemplary. They had never been seen about together, at home or abroad. The house in Portland Place had been closed, and the widow had lived in Italy, a recluse, seeing no one. Half the time had been spent by Claude Rutherford in Africa, hunting big game with a famous sportsman. The other half in well-known studios in Antwerp and Paris. He had thrown off his lazy, dilettante habits, and had gone in for art with a curious renewal of energy. The man was altered somehow. His old acquaintance discovered a change in him: a change for the better, most likely, though they did not all think so.

And now he had attained the summit of mortal bliss, as possible to a man of nine-and-thirty, who had wasted the morning of life. He had won a lovely woman whom he was supposed to adore, and whose wealth ought to be inexhaustible.

"However hard he tries, I don't see how he can run through such a fortune as that," his friends said.

"That kind of quiet, unpretentious man has often a marvellous faculty for getting rid of money," said another; "it oozes out of his pockets without the labour of spending. Rutherford is sure to gamble. A man of that temperament is too idle to find excitement for himself. He wants it ready-made—at the baccarat table, or on the turf."

"Well, it will last him a few years, at the worst, and then he can go into the Charter-house."

The idea of Claude Rutherford going to bed at ten o'clock in the Charter-house made everybody laugh.

The long interval of mourning and probation, of melancholy solitude on Vera's part, and of forced occupation on Claude's, was over: and they two, who in thought and feeling had been long one, were now united in that closer bond which only death or sin can sever. In the intensity of that union it seemed to them as if they had never lived asunder, as if all of their existence that had gone before were no more than a long, dull dream, the grey monotony of life that was less than life, hard and mechanical even in its so-called pleasures.

"I never lived till now," she told him, when she was folded to his heart, in their sumptuous alcove in the great room in Venice, in an hotel that had been a palace, an alcove surrounded with a balustrade, a bed that had been made for a king. "I never lived till now—for now I know that nothing can part us. We belong to each other till death."

"If it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy," he murmured in a low, impassioned voice that soothed her like music.

"And the past is dead," she whispered.

"The past is dead."

The voice that echoed her words had changed.

The winter moonlight sent a flood of cold light across the shining floor, and the glow of burning logs on the hearth glimmered redly under the sculptured arch of the Byzantine fireplace. It was a wonderful room in a wonderful city. Vera had never been in Venice till this night, when she stepped from the station quay into the black boat that was to bring them to the hotel, man and maid and luggage following in a second gondola. To most travellers so arriving, Venice must needs seem a dream city; but to Vera all life had been a dream since she had stood before the altar and heard Father Hammond's grave voice pronounce the words that made her Claude's wife.

She had chosen Venice for their honeymoon, because it was the one famous city in her beloved Italy in which she had never been with Provana.

"It will be all new and strange," she told Claude, and then came the unspoken thought. "He will not be there."

He had been with her in Rome, almost an inseparable companion, until she had grown accustomed to the thought that he must be with her always, wherever she went, an inseparable shadow; but with her marriage the bond that held her to the past was broken, the shadow was lifted. She was young again; young and thoughtless, living in the exquisite hour, almost as happy as she had been when she was an impulsive, light-hearted child of eleven, leaping on to her cousin's knee, and nestling with her arms round his neck, while they watched the waves racing towards the rock where they were sitting, she rather hoping that the waters would rise round them and swallow them. That blue brightness could hardly mean death. They would only become part of the sea—merman and mermaid, children of the ocean. How much better than to return to the dull lodgings, and Lidcott's harsh dominion!

That solitude of two in the loveliest city in Europe seemed altogether of the stuff that dreams are made of. They kept no count of the days and hours. They made no plan for to-morrow. They wandered along the calle, and in and out of the churches, in a desultory and casual way, looking at pictures and statues without any precise knowledge of what they were seeing—only a dreamy delight in things that were beautiful themselves, and which awakened ideas of beauty. They spent idle days in their gondola going from island to island, musing among the historic arches of Torcello, or sauntering along the sands of the Lido. The winter was mild even in England, and here soft air and sunshine suggested April rather than December. It was a delicious world, and in the seclusion of a gondola, or in the half-light of a church, they seemed to have this lovely world all to themselves. There were very few strangers in Venice at this season, and the residents had something more to do than to wander about the narrow calle, or loiter and look at things in the churches, or the Doge's Palace. These two were learning Venice by heart in those leisurely saunterings, a little listless sometimes, as of people whose lives had come to a dead stop.

They never talked of the past, or only of that remote past when Vera was a child, the time of childish happiness by the blue waves and dark cliffs of North Devon. They talked very little of the future. Their talk was of themselves, and of their love. They read Byron and Shelley and Browning, and De Musset. They drank deep of the poetry that Venice had inspired, until every stone in the City of Dreams seemed enchanted, and every noble old mansion, given over perhaps now to commerce, glass-blowers, and dealers in bric-À-brac, seemed a fairy palace.

They drained the cup of life and love. Claude forgot that he had ever thought of the woollen gown and the hempen girdle; Vera forgot that she had ever seen him, haggard and hollow-eyed, crouching over the smouldering olive logs in the monastery on the Roman hill.

Early on their wedding journey, leaning against the side of the boat, hand locked in hand, they had sworn to each other that all the past should be forgotten. Come what, come might, in unknown Fate, they would never remember.

And now they were going back to London in the gay spring season, and Lady Susan Amphlett had another innings. It was delicious to be moving about in a world where everybody wanted to know things that only she could tell them.

"And are they really going to live in the house in Portland Place?"

"Really, really. Where could they get such rooms, such air and space? And that old Italian furniture is priceless. There is nothing better in the Doria Palace. It took the Provana family more than a century to collect it—even with their wealth."

"Well, when I saw the painters at work outside I thought the house must have been sold. This world seems full of strange people. How Vera can reconcile herself to life in that house passes my comprehension. I could understand her keeping the furniture; but to live inside those four walls. I should fancy they were closing in upon me, like a mediÆval torture chamber."

"Vera is all poetry and imagination, but she is not morbid."

"Vera knows that we are in the midst of the unseen, and that our dead are always near us," said a thrilling voice, and Lady Fanny Ransom's dark eyes flashed across the table. "The house can make no difference to her. If she loved her first husband she has not lost him."

"Nice for her, but not so pleasant for her second," murmured a matter-of-fact K.C.

"She was utterly devoted to poor Provana," protested Susie, "but it was the reverent looking-up kind of love that an innocent girl feels for a man old enough to be her father. She has told me the story of their courtship—so sweet—like Paul and Virginia."

"A middle-aged Paul! I thought Rutherford was the hero of the Paul and Virginia chapter of her history."

"Oh, well, they were little lovers as children, and Vera and Claude are the most ideal couple that ever the world has seen. They are going to entertain in a sumptuous style. Their house will be the most popular in London."

"In spite of its being the scene of an unsolved mystery and undiscovered crime. That's the worst of it," said sour middle-age in a garnet necklace. "For my part, I could never sleep a wink in that awful house."

"Ah, but you'll be able to eat and drink in it," remarked Mr. Hortentius, K.C., dryly. "We shall all dine there, if the dinners are as good as they were in poor Provana's time."

Poor Provana! That was his epitaph in the world. On the marble tomb at San Marco, to which the dead man had been carried—in remembrance of a desire expressed in those distant days when he and Vera wandered in the olive woods—there was nothing but his name, and one word: "Re-united."

Vera had been too ill and too much under the dominion of Lady Okehampton to make the dismal journey with her dead; but she had gone from Rome to San Marco, and had spent a melancholy hour in the secluded corner where the cypress cast its long shadow on Guilia's tomb.

She had stood by the tomb in a kind of stupor, hardly conscious of the present, lost in a long dream of the past, living again through those bright April days, with father and daughter, and hearing again the ineffable tenderness in Mario Provana's voice, as he talked to his dying child. What an abyss of time since those sad, sweet days! And now there was nothing left but a name—

MARIO PROVANA

—here, and in certain hospitals in London and Rome, where there were wards or beds established in memory of Mario Provana.