She was alone, but she told herself that solitude did not matter. It was not solitude that weighed upon her spirits as she roamed from room to room in the emptiness and silence. It was the sense of _not_ being alone that weighed upon her. It was the consciousness of a silent presence--the invisible third who had come between her and her husband of late--who had come back into her life. In the noontide of her love, while passion reigned supreme, and the man she loved filled her world, the shadow had been lifted from her path. She had seen all old things dimly--dazzled by the glory of her life's sun. She had remembered nothing, except her childish bliss with the boy who was to be her fate. Her life began and ended in her husband; as it had begun and ended in Claude Rutherford when he was only her friend and companion, the light-hearted companion, whose presence meant happiness. In the first two years of her second marriage she had been completely absorbed in that transcendent love, and in the ceaseless round of pleasures and excitements that her husband contrived for her, filling her days and nights with emotional moments, with little social triumphs and trivial ambitions. Satiety came in an hour--or it may be that it came so slowly and so gradually that there was an hour when Vera awoke to the consciousness that she was tired of everything, that the earth with all its changing loveliness, its surprises of mountain and lake, wood and river, was but a sterile promontory, and the blue vault above Como only a pestilent congregation of vapours. The suddenness of the revelation was startling; but the not uncommon malady that afflicted the Prince of Denmark had been eating her heart for a long time before she was aware of its hold upon her. And with the coming of satiety, the distaste for amusement, the distrust of love, came the shadow. Memory that had been lulled asleep by the magic philtre of passion, awakened and was alive again. She roamed the great, silent house, haunting with a morbid preference those rooms that were particularly associated with the dead man, that range of spacious rooms on the ground floor where nothing had been altered since Mario Provana lived in them: his library, and the severe, official-looking sitting-room adjoining, where he was often closeted with his partners and allies, his head clerks and managers, his business visitors from Vienna, Rome, Berlin, Madrid, New York.