The Roman villa was a fairy palace of light and flowers, and its long range of windows flashed across the blue vapours of the December night, and might have been noticed as a golden glory in the far distance by solitary watchers in the monasteries on the Aventine hill.

It was Vera's first reception; and all that there was of Roman rank and beauty, all that there was of transatlantic wealth and cosmopolitan talent in the most wonderful city in the world had assembled in prompt response to her card of invitation.

The financier's palace still bore the stamp of mercantile riches. Claude had urged his wife to give the splendid house a splendid name; so that, in the ever-changing society of the Italian capital, the source of all that splendour might be forgotten; but he had urged in vain.

"It was his father's house, and it was my home with him," she said, with a strange look—the look that Claude feared. "While I live it shall never have any other name."

"You are the first woman I ever knew with such a cult of the dismal," he said. "Most widows wish to forget."

"Most widows can forget," she answered.

He turned and left her at the word; and she heard him singing sotto voce as he went along the corridor, "La donna e mobile."

"At least I do not change," she thought.

This had happened in their first winter in Rome—a mere flash of melancholy—soon forgotten in those wild days when the pace was fastest, and when life went by in a hurricane of fashionable pleasures. Visiting and entertaining, opera and theatre and race-course; a rush to Naples to hear a wonderful tenor; to Milan to see the new dancer at the Scala; something new and fatiguing for every week and every day. They were both calmer now, and it may be that both were tired, though it was only Vera who talked openly of weariness.

To-night she was looking lovely; but a Russian savant, who was among the most illustrious of her guests, whispered to his neighbour as she passed them, "She will not live her hundred and forty years."

"I am afraid it is a question of months rather than years," replied his friend, a famous Roman doctor.

Something there was in the radiant face, pale, but full of light and life, in which the eye of an expert read auguries of evil; but to the elegant mob circulating through those sumptuous rooms Mrs. Rutherford was still beautiful with the bloom of health. Her pallor was of a transparent fairness, more brilliant than other women's carnations. The popular American painter had made one of his most startling hits, two years before, by his exquisite rendering of that rare beauty, the alabaster pallor, the dreaming eyes, blue-grey, or blue with a touch of green. He had caught her "mermaid look"; and his most fervent admirers, looking at the portrait in the Academy crowd, declared that the colour in those mysterious eyes changed as they looked. The portrait was the sensation of the year. Her eyes changed, and she seemed to be moving out of the canvas, said the superior critics; and the herd went about parroting them. She had her far-away look to-night, as she stood near the doorway in the Rubens room, the first of the long suite; and though she had a gracious greeting for everybody, those who admired her most had a strange fancy that she was only the lovely semblance or outer shell of a woman, whose actual self was worlds away.

There was nothing dreamy or far-away about Claude Rutherford to-night. He was a man whose nature it was to live only in the present, and to live every moment of his life. To-night, in these splendid surroundings, in this crowd of the noble and the celebrated, he felt as one who has conquered Fate, and has the world at his feet. He was a universal favourite. The hearts of women softened at his smile; and even men liked him for his careless gaiety.

"Always jolly and friendly, and without a scrap of side."

That was what they said of him. To have the spending of the Provana millions and to be without side, seemed a virtue above all praise. People liked him better than his ethereal wife. She was charming, but elusive. That other-world look of hers repelled would-be admirers, and even chilled her friends.

The Amphletts had arrived at the villa on a long visit, just in time for Vera's first party; and Lady Susan was floating about the rooms in an ecstasy of admiration. She had never seen them in Mario Provana's time, and though she had been invited by Vera more than once in the last three years, this was her first visit.

Her tiresome husband had preferred Northamptonshire, and she had not been modern enough to leave him; and now he had been only lured a thousand miles from the Pytchley by the promise of hunting on the Campagna.

"At last Vera is in her proper environment," Lady Susan told a young attache, who had been among the intimates in London. "She was out of her proper setting in Portland Place. Nothing less beautiful than this palace is in harmony with her irresistible charm. Other women have beauty, don't you know; Mrs. Bellenden, par exemple."

"Mrs. Bellenden is an eye-opener," murmured the diplomat.

"Yes, I know what you are thinking, the handsomest woman in Europe, and all that kind of thing; but utterly without charm. Even we women admire her, just as we admire a huge La France rose, or a golden pheasant, or a bunch of grapes as big as plovers' eggs, with the purple bloom upon them; the perfection of physical beauty. But the light behind the painted window, the secret, the charm is not in it. Beauty and to spare, but nothing more."

Mrs. Bellenden sailed past them on the arm of the English Ambassador while Susie expatiated.

It was her first appearance in Roman society, and she was the sensation of the evening.

A form as perfect as the Venus of the Capitol, a face of commanding beauty, a toilette of studied simplicity, a gown of dark green velvet, without a vestige of trimming, the dÊcolletage audacious, and for ornament an emerald necklace in a Tiffany setting, which even among hereditary jewels challenged admiration, just a row of single emeralds clasping a throat of Parian marble.

Mrs. Bellenden had the men at her feet; from Ambassadors to callow striplings, new to Rome and to diplomacy, sprigs of good family, who were hardly allowed to do more than seal letters, or index a letter-book. All these courted her as if she had been royal; but the women who had known her in London kept themselves aloof somehow, except the American women, who praised and patronised her, or would have patronised, but for something in those dark violet eyes that stopped them.

"It isn't safe to say sarcastic things to a woman with eyes like hers," they told each other. "It would be as safe to try to take a rise out of a crouching tiger, or to put a cobra's back up, for larks."

Lady Susan was about the only woman of position who talked to Mrs. Bellenden; but Susie loved notorieties of all kinds, and had never kept aloof from speckled peaches, if the peaches were otherwise interesting.

"I call Bellenden a remarkable personality," she told Claude, whom she contrived to buttonhole for five minutes in the corridor after supper. "A rural parson's daughter, brought up on cabbages and the tithe pig. A woman who has spent a year in a lunatic asylum, and yet has brains enough to set the world at defiance. You will see she'll be a duchess—a pucker English duchess—before she has finished."

"She is more than worthy of the strawberry leaves; but I don't see where the pucker duke is to come from. Her only chance would be a fledgling, who had never crossed the Atlantic."

If her own sex persisted in a certain aloofness, Mrs. Bellenden had her court, and could afford to do without them. In the picture gallery, after supper, she was the centre of a circle, and her rich voice and joyous laughter sounded above all other voices in the after-midnight hour, when the crowd had thinned and most of the great ladies had gone away.

Susie watched that group from a distance, and wondered when Mrs. Bellenden was going to break through the ring of her worshippers and make her way to the Rubens room, where the mistress of the house was waiting to bid the last of her guests good-night.

The first hour after midnight was wearing on, and Susan Amphlett, who had eaten two suppers, each with an amusing escort, was beginning to feel that she had had enough of the party and would like to be having her hair brushed in the solitude of her palatial bedroom. But she wanted to see the last of Mrs. Bellenden, if not the last of the party; and she kept her cicisbeo hanging on, and pretended to be interested in the pictures, while she furtively observed the proceedings of the notorious beauty. She was making the men laugh. That was the spell she was weaving over the group who stood entranced around her. Light talk that raised lighter laughter: that was her after-midnight glamour. She had been grave and dignified as she moved through the rooms by the side of the Ambassador. But now, encircled by a ring of "nice boys," she was frankly Bohemian, and amused herself by amusing them, with splendid disregard of conventionalities. Reckless mirth sparkled in her eyes; uproarious laughter followed upon her speech. Whatever she was saying, however foolish, however outrageous, it was simply enchanting to the men who heard her; and in the heart of the ring Claude Rutherford was standing close beside the lovely freelance, hanging upon her words, joyous, irresponsible as herself. The spell was broken at last, or the fairy laid down her wand, and allowed Claude to escort her to her hostess, who just touched her offered hand with light finger-tips; and thence to the outer vestibule, an octagon room where the white marble faces of Olympian deities, who were immortal because they had never lived, looked with calm scorn upon the flushed cheeks and haggard eyes of men and women too eager to drain the cup of sensuous life. Claude and Mrs. Bellenden stood side by side in the winter moonlight while they waited for carriage after carriage to roll away, before a miniature brougham of neatest build came to the edge of the crimson carpet. They had had plenty of time for whispered talk while they waited, but there had been no more laughter, rather a subdued and almost whispered interchange of confidential speech; and the last word as he stood by the brougham door was "to-morrow."

Lady Susan and Vera went up the great staircase together, Susie with her usual demonstrative affection, her arm interwoven with her friend's.

"Your party has been glorious, darling!" she began. "I see now that it is the house that makes the glory and the dream. Your parties in Portland Place were just as good, as parties, but oh, the difference! Instead of the vulgar crush upon the staircase, and the three overcrowded drawing-rooms, immense for London—this luxury of space, this gorgeous succession of rooms, so numerous that it makes one giddy to count them. Vera, I see now that it is only vast space that can give grandeur. The bricks and stone in your London house would have made a street in Mayfair; but it is a hovel compared with this. And to think of that good-for-nothing cousin of mine leaving a bachelor's diggings in St. James's to be lord of this palace. There never was such luck!"

"I don't think Claude cares very much for the villa, or for Rome," Vera answered coldly. "He prefers London and Newmarket."

"That's what men are made of. They don't care for houses or for furniture. They only care for horses and dogs, and other women," assented Susan lightly.

They were at the door of Vera's rooms by this time, but Susie's entwining arms still held her.

"Do let me come in for a cause."

"I'm very tired."

"Only five minutes."

"Oh, as long as you like. I may as well sit up and talk as lie down, and think."

"What, are you as bad a sleeper as ever?"

"I have lost the knack of sleep. But I suppose I sleep enough, as I am alive. Some people talk as if three or four sleepless nights would kill them; but Sir Andrew Clarke let Gladstone lie awake seven nights before he would give him an opiate."

"But you will lose your beauty—worse than losing your life. You looked lovely to-night—too lovely, too much like an exquisite phantom. And now, my sweet Vera, don't be angry if I touch upon a delicate—no, an indelicate subject. You must never let Mrs. Bellenden enter your house again."

"Indeed, Susie! But why?"

"Because she is simply too outrageous!"

"Do you mean too handsome, too attractive?"

"I mean she is absolutely disreputable. If you had seen her in the picture gallery, with a crowd of men round her—your husband among them—laughing immoderately, as men only laugh when outrageous things are being said!"

"And was she saying the outrageous things?"

"Undoubtedly. I watched her from a distance, while I pretended to be looking at the pictures. Vera, I don't want to worry you, but that woman is dangerous!"

"Dangerous?"

"Yes, like the Lurlei and people of that class. She is the very woman Solomon described in Proverbs—and he knew. She is a danger for you, Vera, a danger for your peace of mind. She is a wicked enchantress, an enemy to all happy wives; and she is trying to steal your husband."

"I am not afraid.".

"But you ought to be afraid. Roger and I are not a romantic couple; but if I saw him too attentive to such a woman as Mrs. B. I should—well, Vera, I should take measures. Remember, the woman is the danger. It doesn't matter how much a man flirts, as long as he flirts with the harmless woman. You really should take measures."

"That is not in my line, Susie. When my husband has left off caring for me I shall know it, and that will be the end."

Susan looked at her with anxious scrutiny.

"I'm afraid you are leaving off caring for him," she said rather sadly.

"Never mind, dear. The sands are running through the glass, whether we are glad or sorry, and the end of the hour will come."

"Don't!" cried Susie, wincing as if she had been hit.

"Good night, dear, I am very tired."

"Yes, that's what it means!" Susie kissed her effusively. "Your nerves are worn to snapping point, you poor, pale thing. Good night."

Vera was on the Palatine Hill next morning before Lady Susan had left her sumptuous bed, a vast expanse of embroidered linen and down pillows, under a canopy of satin and gold. Painted cherubim looked down upon her from the white satin dome, cherubs or cupids, she was not sure to which order the rosy cheeks and winged shoulders belonged.

"They must be cupids," she decided at last. "They have too many legs for cherubim."

Vera was wandering among the vestiges of Imperial Rome with the dog Boroo for company. She liked to roam about these weedy pathways, among the dust of a hundred palaces, in the clear, sunlit morning, at an hour when no tourist's foot had passed the gate.

The custodians knew her as a frequent visitor, and left her free to wander among the ruins as she pleased, without guidance or interference. They had been inclined at first to question the Irish terrier's right to the same licence, but a sweet smile and a ten-lire note made them oblivious of his existence. He might have been some phantom hound of mediÆval legend, passing the gate unseen. Simply clad in black cloth, a skirt short enough for easy walking, a loose coat that left her figure undefined, and a neat little hat muffled in a grey gauze veil through which her face showed vaguely, Vera was able to walk about the great city in the morning hours without attracting much notice. Among some few of the shopkeepers and fly drivers who had observed her repeated passage along particular streets, she was known as the lady with the dog. In her wanderings beyond the gates, in places where there were still rural lanes and cottagers' gardens, she would sometimes stop to talk to the children who clustered round her and received the shower of baiocchi which she scattered among them with tumultuous gratitude, kissing the hem of her gown, and calling down the blessings of the Holy Mother on "la bella Signora, e il caro cane," Boroo coming in for his share of blessings.

They were lovely children some of them, with their great Italian eyes, and they would be sunning themselves on the steps of the TrinitÀ del Monte by and by, when the spring came, waiting to attract the attention of a painter on the look-out for ideal infancy; wicked little wretches, as keen for coin as any Hebrew babe of old in the long-vanished Ghetto, dirty, and free, and happy; but they struck a sad note in Vera's memory, recalling her honeymoon year in Rome, and how fondly Mario Provana had hoped for a child to sanctify the bond of marriage, and to fill the empty place that Giulia's death had left in his heart. A year ago Vera had been killing thought in ceaseless movement, in ephemeral pleasures that left no time for memory or regret, but since the coming of satiety she had found that to think or to regret was less intolerable than to live a life of spurious gaiety, to laugh with a leaden heart, and to pretend to be amused by pleasures that sickened her. Here she found a better cure for painful thought, in a city whose abiding beauty was interwoven with associations that appealed to her imagination, and lifted her out of the petty life of to-day into the life of the heroic past. In Rome she could forget herself, and all that made the sum of her existence. She wandered in a world of beautiful dreams. The dust she trod upon was mingled with the blood of heroes and of saints.

She had seen all that was noblest in the city with Mario Provana for her guide, he for whom every street and every church was peopled with the spirits of the mighty dead, from the colossal dome that roofed the tomb of the warrior king who made modern Italy, to the vault where St. Peter and St. Paul had lain in darkness and in chains.

She had seen and understood all these things with Mario at her side, enchanted by her keen interest in his beloved city, and delighted to point out and explain every detail.

For Mario every out-of-the-way corner of Rome had its charm—for Claude Rome meant nothing but the afternoon drive along the Corso, and the bi-weekly meet of hounds on the Appian Way. Everything else was a bore. It was the Palatine where she and Mario had returned oftenest and lingered longest, for it seemed the sum of all that was grandest in the story of Rome, or, rather, it was Rome. How often she had stood by her husband's side on this noble terrace, gazing at the circle of hills, and recalling an age when this spot was the centre of the civilised earth! Here were the ruins of a forgotten world; and the palaces of Caligula and Nero seemed to belong to modern history, as compared with the rude remains of a city that had perished before the War-God's twins had hung at their fierce foster-mother's breast. Every foot of ground had its traditions of ineffable grandeur, and was peopled with ghosts. They stood upon the ashes of palaces more splendid and more costly than the mind of the multi-millionaire of to-day had ever conceived—the palaces of poets and statesmen, of Rome's greatest orators, and of her most successful generals; of Emperors whose brief reign made but half a page of history, ending in the inevitable murder; of beautiful women with whom poison was the natural resource in a difficulty; of gladiators elevated into demi-gods; of mothers who killed their sons, and sons who killed their mothers; and of all those hundred palaces, and that strange dream of glory and of crime there was nothing left but ruined walls, and the dust in which the fool's parsley and the wild parsnip grew rank and high.

Amidst those memories of two thousand years ago, Vera felt as if life were so brief and petty a thing, such a mere moment in the infinity of time, that no individual story, no single existence, with its single grief, no wrong done, could be a thing to lament or to brood over. Nothing seemed to matter, when one remembered how all this greatness had come and gone like a ray of sunshine on a wall, the light and the glory of a moment.

And what of those grander lives, the Christian martyrs, the men who fought with beasts, and gave their bodies to be burned, the women who went with tranquil brow and steadfast eyes to meet a death of horror, rather than deny the new truth that had come into their lives?

There were other, darker memories in her solitary wanderings. She returned sometimes to the hill behind the Villa Medici. She lingered in the dusty road outside the Benedictine monastery, and peered through the iron gate, gazing into the desolate garden, where only the utilitarian portion was cared for, and where shrubs, grass, and the sparse winter flowers languished in neglect, where the gloomy cypresses stood darkly out against the mouldering plaster on the wall; the prison gate, within which she had seen her lover sitting by the dying fire, a melancholy figure, with brooding eyes that refused to look at her.

"It would have been better for us both if he had stayed there," she thought. "If we had been true to ourselves we should have parted at the door of his prison for ever. It would have been better for us both—better and happier. The cloister for him and for me. A few years of silence and solitude. A few years of penitential pain; and then the open gate, and the Good Shepherd's welcome to the lost sheep."

Yes, it would have been better. No pure and abiding joy had come to her from her union with her lover. They had loved each other with a love that had filled the cup of life in the first years of their marriage; they had loved each other, but it had been with a passion that needed the stimulus of an unceasing change of pleasures to keep it alive; and when the pleasures grew stale, and there were no more new things or new places left in the world, their love had languished in the grey atmosphere of thought.

She knew that her love for Claude Rutherford was dead. The third year of wedlock had killed it. She looked back and remembered what he had once been to her. She saw the picture of her past go by, a vivid panorama lit by a lurid light—from the July midnight in the rose garden by the river, to the November evening in Rome, when he had come back to her from his living grave—and she had fallen upon his breast, and let him set the seal of a fatal love upon her lips—the seal that had made her his in the rose garden, and had fixed her fate for ever. This later kiss was more fatal; for it meant the hope of heaven renounced, and a soul abandoned to the sinner's doom. For her part, at least, love had died. Slowly, imperceptibly, from day to day, from hour to hour, the glamour had faded, the light had gone. Slowly and reluctantly she had awakened to the knowledge of her husband's shallow nature, and had found how little there was for her to love and honour below that airy pleasantness which had exercised so potent a charm, from the hour when she met and remembered the friend of her childhood, until the night of the ball, when he had whispered his plan for their future as they spun round in their last waltz. All had shown the lightness of the sunny nature that charmed her. Even in talking of the desperate step they were going to take he had seemed hardly serious. His confidence was so strong in the future. Just one resolute act—a little unpleasantness, perhaps; and then emancipation, and a life of unalloyed happiness—"the world forgetting, by the world forgot"—themselves the only world that was worth thinking about.

And it was to this shallow nature that she had given her love and her life; for she could see nothing in life outside that fatal love. As that perished, she felt that she must die with it. There was nothing left—no child—no "forward looking hopes."

But there was the memory of the past! In her lonely walks about the environs of Rome, the past was with her. She was always looking back. She could not tread those paths without remembering who had trodden them with her when the wonder of Rome was new. The man who was her companion, then the strong man, the man of high thoughts and decisive action, the thinker and the worker. The man of grave and quiet manners, who could yet be terrible when the fire below that calm surface was kindled. She had seen that he could be terrible. One episode in their happy honeymoon life had always remained in her memory, when at a crowded railway station he had been separated from her for a few moments in the throng and had found her shrinking in terror from the insolence of a vulgar dandy. She had never forgotten the white anger in Mario Provana's face as he took the scared wretch by the collar and flung him towards the edge of the platform. She never could forget the rage in that dark face, and it had come back to her in after years in visions of unspeakable horror. He who was so kind could be so terrible. So kind! Now in her lonely wanderings it was of his kindness she thought most, his fond indulgence in those days when he had made the world new for her, days when she had looked back at her long apprenticeship to poverty—the daily lesson in the noble art of keeping up appearances, and Grannie's monotonous wailings over cruel destiny—and wondered if this idolised wife could be the same creature as the penniless girl in the shabby lodgings. She knew now that the devoted husband of that happy year was the man who was worthy of something more than gratitude and obedience, something more than duty, worthy of the best and truest love that a good woman could feel for a good man. This was the noble lover. Wherever she went in that city of great memories the shadow of the past went with her. He was always there—she heard his voice, and the thoughts and feelings of years ago were more real than the consciousness of to-day. Forgotten things had come back. The fever-dream had ended: and in the cold light of an awakened conscience she knew and understood the noble friend and companion she had slighted and lost.

Lady Susan was a somewhat exacting visitor; but it was years since she had seen the inside of a dining-room before luncheon, so Vera's mornings were her own. The half-past twelve o'clock dÉjeuner even appeared painfully early to Susie, though she contrived to be present at that luxurious meal, where there were often amusing droppers-in, lads from the embassies, soldiers in picturesque uniforms, literary people and artistic people, mostly Americans, people whom Susie could not afford to miss.

Vera's mornings were her own, but she was obliged to do the afternoon drive in the Pincio gardens and along the Corso with Lady Susan, and after the drive she could creep away for an hour to her too-spacious saloon where all the gods and goddesses of Olympus looked down upon her from the tapestry, and sit and dream in the gloaming—or brood over a new novel by Matilda Seraio, her reading-lamp making a speck of light in a world of shadows.

Here, by the red log-fire, where the pine-cones hissed and sputtered, the Irish terrier was her happy companion, laying his head upon her knee, or thrusting his black nose into her hand, now and then, to show her that there was somebody who loved her, and only refraining from leaping on her lap by the good manners inculcated in his puppyhood by an accomplished canine educator.

Sometimes she would throw down her book, snatch up a fur coat from the sofa where it lay, and go out through the glass door that opened into the gardens; and then, with Boroo bounding and leaping round her, letting off volleys of joyful barks, she would run to the lonely garden at the back of the villa, where there was a long terrace on a ridge of high ground shaded with umbrella pines, and with a statue here and there in a niche cut in the wall of century-old ilex.

The solitary walk with her dog in a dark garden always had a quieting effect upon her nerves—like the morning ramble in the outskirts of Rome. To be alone, to be able to think, soothed her. The life without thought was done with. Now to think was to be consoled. Even memories that brought tears had comfort in them.

"What can I do for him but remember him and regret him?" she thought. "It is my only atonement. If what Francis Symeon told me is true and the dead are near us, he knows and understands. He knows, and he forgives."

Sad, sweet thoughts, that came with a rush of tears!

These quiet hours helped her to bear the evening gaieties, the evening splendours. She went everywhere that Claude wanted her to go, gave as many parties as he liked, dÉjeuners, dinners, suppers after opera or theatre, anything. Her gold was poured out like water. The Newmarket horses were running in the Roman races; the Leicestershire hunters were ridden to death on the Campagna. Claude Rutherford was more talked about, and more admired, than any young man in Rome. He laughed sometimes, remembering the old books, and told them he was like Julius CÆsar in his adolescence, a "harmless trifler." Claude Rutherford was happy; and he thought that his wife was happy also. Certainly she had been happy at Disbrowe less than half a year ago; and there had been nothing since then to distress her. The long rambles of which Susan told him, the evening seclusion, meant nothing. No doubt she was morbid; she had always been morbid. If she had a grief of any kind she loved to brood upon it.

"What grief can she have?" Susan asked. "There never was such a perfect life. She has everything."

"I don't know. We have no children. She may long for a child."

"Do you feel the want of children?" Susan asked bluntly.

"Yes. I should have liked a child. Our houses are silent—infernally silent. A house without children seems under a curse, somehow."

Susan looked at him with open-eyed wonder. This trivial cousin of hers, who seemed to live only for ephemeral delights, this man to sigh for offspring, to want his futile career echoed by a son. He who was neither soldier nor senator, who had no rag of reputation to bequeath: what should he want with an heir? And to want childish voices in his home—to complain of loneliness! He who was never alone!

Mrs. Bellenden had not been invited to the Villa Provana after the night when Susie had made her protest, nor had Claude urged his wife to invite her. Mrs. Bellenden had begun to be talked about in Rome very much as she had been talked about in London. The noblest of the Roman palaces had not opened their Cyclopean doors to her. There were certain afternoons when all that was most distinguished in Roman Society crossed those noble thresholds, as by right—went in and came out again, not much happier or richer in ideas, perhaps, for the visit, but just a shade more conscious of superiority.

Mrs. Bellenden, driving up and down the Corso, saw the carriages waiting, and scowled at them as she went by. Mrs. Bellenden was not bien vue in Rome. The painters and sculptors raved about her, and she had to give sittings—for head and bust—to several of them. She was one man's Juno, and another man's Helen of Troy. Her portrait, by a famous American painter, was to be the rage at next year's picture show. If to be worshipped for her beauty could satisfy a woman, Mrs. Bellenden might have been content; but she was not.

Her exclusion from those three or four monumental palaces made her feel herself an outsider; and she bristled with fury when no more cards of invitation came from the Villa Provana.

"I suppose that white rag of a woman is jealous," she thought; but she had just so much womanly pride left in her as to refrain from asking Claude Rutherford why his wife ignored her.

Lady Susan had not even spoken of Mrs. Bellenden after the night when she had delivered herself of a friendly warning. But although she did not talk to Vera of the siren, she had plenty to say to other people about her, and plenty to hear.

"I hope that foolish cousin of mine is not carrying on with that odious woman," she had said tentatively to more than one great lady.

"Why, my dear creature, everybody knows that he is making an idiot of himself about her. She is riding his hunters to death; and she made an exhibition of herself at the races last Sunday when one of Rutherford's horses won by half a length, putting her arms round the winner's neck and shaking hands with the jockey. The King and Queen and all the Quirinal party were looking at her. She is the kind of woman who always advertises an intrigue. After all, I believe she is not half so bad as people think her; only she can't keep an affair quiet. She must always play to the gallery."

Susie shook her head, with a sigh that was almost a groan.

"Oh, my poor Vera, so sweet, so pure, so ethereal."

"That's where it is, my dear," said her friend. "Men don't care for those ethereal women—long. Women hold men by their vices, not by their virtues."