He turned and left her at the word; and she heard him singing _sotto voce_ as he went along the corridor, "La donna e mobile." "At least _I_ do not change," she thought. This had happened in their first winter in Rome--a mere flash of melancholy--soon forgotten in those wild days when the pace was fastest, and when life went by in a hurricane of fashionable pleasures. Visiting and entertaining, opera and theatre and race-course; a rush to Naples to hear a wonderful tenor; to Milan to see the new dancer at the Scala; something new and fatiguing for every week and every day. They were both calmer now, and it may be that both were tired, though it was only Vera who talked openly of weariness. To-night she was looking lovely; but a Russian savant, who was among the most illustrious of her guests, whispered to his neighbour as she passed them, "_She_ will not live her hundred and forty years." "I am afraid it is a question of months rather than years," replied his friend, a famous Roman doctor. Something there was in the radiant face, pale, but full of light and life, in which the eye of an expert read auguries of evil; but to the elegant mob circulating through those sumptuous rooms Mrs. Rutherford was still beautiful with the bloom of health. Her pallor was of a transparent fairness, more brilliant than other women's carnations. The popular American painter had made one of his most startling hits, two years before, by his exquisite rendering of that rare beauty, the alabaster pallor, the dreaming eyes, blue-grey, or blue with a touch of green. He had caught her "mermaid look"; and his most fervent admirers, looking at the portrait in the Academy crowd, declared that the colour in those mysterious eyes changed as they looked. The portrait was the sensation of the year. Her eyes changed, and she seemed to be moving out of the canvas, said the superior critics; and the herd went about parroting them. She had her far-away look to-night, as she stood near the doorway in the Rubens room, the first of the long suite; and though she had a gracious greeting for everybody, those who admired her most had a strange fancy that she was only the lovely semblance or outer shell of a woman, whose actual self was worlds away. There was nothing dreamy or far-away about Claude Rutherford to-night. He was a man whose nature it was to live only in the present, and to live every moment of his life. To-night, in these splendid surroundings, in this crowd of the noble and the celebrated, he felt as one who has conquered Fate, and has the world at his feet. He was a universal favourite. The hearts of women softened at his smile; and even men liked him for his careless gaiety. "Always jolly and friendly, and without a scrap of side."