"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."