It was the dead season of the year. The late lingering roses on the walls had a sodden look, the pepper trees drooped disconsolately, and a curtain of grey mist hung over the parade, where Vera had walked, alone and dejected, before the coming of Giulia and her father. The hills where they had driven looked farther away in the shadowy atmosphere. There was no gleaming whiteness on the distant mountains. All was grey and melancholy--and in unison with her thoughts of the dead. She had come there to look upon her husband's grave. She had been prostrate and helpless at the time of his burial, and had only just been capable of arousing herself from a state of apathy, to insist that he should be carried back to the country of his birth, and should lie beside his daughter in the shadow of the cypresses, between the sea and the olive woods. Even in that agonising time the picture of that familiar spot had been in her mind as she gave her instructions; and she had seen the marble tomb in its green enclosure, and the tall trees standing deeply black against the pale gold of the sky, as on that evening when Mario Provana had found her sitting by his daughter's tomb. He must lie there, she told his partner, nowhere else; no, not even in Rome, where his family had their stately sepulchre. It was under the marble tomb he had made for his idolised child that he must rest. And now, in the dull grey November, she stood once more beside the marble and read the lines that had been graven under Giulia's brief epitaph. "Also in memory of Mario Provana, her father, who died in London, on July the thirteenth, 19--, in the fifty-seventh year of his age." And below this one word--"Re-united." She stayed long in the green enclosure, her dog coming back to her after much exploration of the wood above, where he had startled and scattered any animal life that he could find there, and the seashore below, where he stirred the tideless waves by the vehemence of his plunges; and then she went for a long ramble in the familiar paths where she had walked with Provana in those sunny afternoons, before the ride to the chocolate mills. She stayed nearly a week at San Marco, repeating the same process every day; first a lingering visit to the grave, and then a long, lonely walk in the paths she had trodden with the man whom she had thought of only as her friend's father, until by an imperceptible progress he had made himself the one close friend of her life. She took pains to find the very paths they had trodden together, the humble shrines or chapels they had looked at, the rocks where they had sat down to rest. When she had first spoken of revisiting San Marco Claude had done his uttermost to dissuade her. "Don't be morbid," he had said more than once. "Your mind has a fatal leaning that way. You ought to fight against it."