Provana had been gone more than fourteen days, and his cabled messages told her of delays and difficulties. The financial crisis was more serious than he had anticipated, and he would have to see it out. He had sent her several messages, but only one letter--a kind letter, such as an uncle might have written to a niece; but it seemed to her there was no love in it, not even such love as he had lavished on his daughter. There was nothing left of the love that had wrapped her round like summer sunlight, the strong man's love that had made her so proud of having been chosen by him, so tranquil in the assurance of a happiness that nothing could change. The change had come before they had lived a year in that great, gloomy London house, when she had been less than two years a wife. It was after parting with Claude in the garden, and creeping quietly up to her room in the second hour of the new day, while doors were beginning to open and voices to sound as the card-players bade good-night; it was in the stillness of the pretty guest-chamber that Vera began to think of Mario Provana, and the impassioned love that had ended in a frozen aloofness. He had said, "Let there be no pretending." Could he have told her more absolutely that his love was dead, and that no charm of sweetness in her could make it live again? She had made her poor little attempt to win him back; and it had failed. What more was left but to be happy in her own way? CHAPTER XII The season was dying hard. Lady Leominster's ball, at the great old house at Fulham, was the last flash of an expiring fire. The Houses of Parliament had closed their historic doors. The walls of the Royal Academy had been stripped of their masterpieces, and empty themselves, looked down upon dusty emptiness. All the best theatres were shut; London was practically empty. The few thousand lingerers in a wilderness of deserted streets bewailed the inanity of the daily Press. There was nothing in the morning papers; and the evening papers were worse, since they were obliged to echo the morning nothingness. The people who never read books were longing for something startling in those indispensable papers, were it even a declaration of war. Suddenly their longing was satisfied. The morning papers were devoured with eagerness. The evening paper was waited for with feverish expectancy. All of a sudden the great army of the brainless found themselves with something to think about, something to talk about, something upon which to build up hypotheses, to which, once built, they adhered with a fierce persistency. There had been a murder. A murder in the heart of London, in one of the fine houses of the West End; not one of the finest, for, after all, spacious and splendid as the house might be, it was not like Berkeley or Devonshire, Lansdowne or Stafford. It was only one in a row of spacious houses, the house of a foreign financier, a man who dealt in millions, and who was himself the owner of millions.