She had wanted this dog. She had wanted some warm-hearted creature to love her, and to be loved by her. It had been the vacant house of her life that called for an inhabitant. She had awakened from her fever-dream of happiness, to find herself alone, utterly alone, in a world of which she was weary. Claude Rutherford was of no more account to her. The thing that had happened was something worse than drifting apart. Gradually and imperceptibly the distance between them had widened, until she had begun to ask herself if she had ever loved him. Boroo went with his mistress on the long journey to San Marco, and behaved with an admirable discretion at the big hotel at Marseilles, where, though he would have liked to try conclusions with a stalwart _dogue de Bordeaux_ that he met in one of the long corridors, he contented himself with a passing growl as he crept after Vera to his post outside her room. All things were strange to him in these first continental experiences; but he bore all things with sublime restraint, concentrating all his brain-power and all his emotional force on the one supreme duty of guarding the lovely lady who had adopted him. At the Hôtel des Anglais Mrs. Rutherford was received with rapture, and the spacious suite on the first floor was, as it were, laid at her feet. She would, of course, occupy those rooms, and no other; the rooms where Signor Provana and his sweet young daughter had lived. Signor Canincio ignored the fact that the sweet young daughter had also died there. No. Mrs. Rutherford would have the rooms in which she had lived with her grandmother. "I want our old rooms, please," she said. "The rooms in which you were so happy--where you spent two winters with the illustrious Lady Felicia." Signor Canincio at once perceived how natural it was for Madame to prefer those rooms. Everything should be made ready immediately. His season had not yet begun; but his hotel would be full to overflowing in December, when he expected many of Madame's old friends to settle down for the winter. Vera smiled as she remembered those "old friends" with whom she had never been friendly; the sour spinsters and widows who had always resented Lady Felicia's determination to deny herself the advantage of their society.