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?