"If it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy," he murmured in a low, impassioned voice that soothed her like music. "And the past is dead," she whispered. "The past is dead." The voice that echoed her words had changed. The winter moonlight sent a flood of cold light across the shining floor, and the glow of burning logs on the hearth glimmered redly under the sculptured arch of the Byzantine fireplace. It was a wonderful room in a wonderful city. Vera had never been in Venice till this night, when she stepped from the station quay into the black boat that was to bring them to the hotel, man and maid and luggage following in a second gondola. To most travellers so arriving, Venice must needs seem a dream city; but to Vera all life had been a dream since she had stood before the altar and heard Father Hammond's grave voice pronounce the words that made her Claude's wife. She had chosen Venice for their honeymoon, because it was the one famous city in her beloved Italy in which she had never been with Provana. "It will be all new and strange," she told Claude, and then came the unspoken thought. "He will not be there." He had been with her in Rome, almost an inseparable companion, until she had grown accustomed to the thought that he must be with her always, wherever she went, an inseparable shadow; but with her marriage the bond that held her to the past was broken, the shadow was lifted. She was young again; young and thoughtless, living in the exquisite hour, almost as happy as she had been when she was an impulsive, light-hearted child of eleven, leaping on to her cousin's knee, and nestling with her arms round his neck, while they watched the waves racing towards the rock where they were sitting, she rather hoping that the waters would rise round them and swallow them. That blue brightness could hardly mean death. They would only become part of the sea--merman and mermaid, children of the ocean. How much better than to return to the dull lodgings, and Lidcott's harsh dominion!