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? "MY DEAR VERA, "I hear you are at your villa, living in seclusion and refusing all visits; but I think you will make an exception for me, as it is vital for me to see you. I am in great trouble, and I want your help--badly. I shall call on you at noon to-morrow. Pray do not shut your door against me. "Yours affectionately, "MAGDALEN RUTHERFORD."