All that was best in Claude Rutherford was in the ascendant during these long, slow weeks of silent sorrow, in which he knew that the man with the scythe was at the door, that nothing money could buy or love devise could save the woman he loved. He had broken finally with that other woman: finally, for the fiery cup had lost its intoxicating power, and the end had been a vulgar quarrel about money. Whatever was to happen to him, he was safe from that siren's spells. All his natural sweetness, his sympathy and charm, were for Vera, in those quiet weeks of September and October, when there was nobody in London, and the chariot wheels rolled no more in the broad roadway. He was at his best in his wife's white morning-room, where the faces of the immortals looked down upon him, and where he was kind even to the dog she loved--the Irish terrier, brought home after his half-year's quarantine--who stretched his strong limbs and rough, red-brown body against her satin slippers, as she lay on her sofa, a fragile figure, shadowy in her loose white gown. All that was best in this man, the tenderness, the sympathy, was in evidence now; a failure no doubt, trivial and shallow, incapable of deep feeling, perhaps, but a sweet, lovable nature; a nature that had made women love him whether he wanted their love or not. "It is very good of you to give me so much of your time," Vera said one day, slipping her thin little hand into his, which was almost as thin. "Invalids are wretched company, and I don't want you to have too much of this dull room." "I do not find it dull--and it is no duller for me than for you." "It is never dull for me. I have my faces. _They_ are always company." "Your faces--You mean those portraits?" "Byron, Scott, Browning. Yes, they are always company. I have looked at them till they are alive. I have read Walter Scott's journals and Byron's letters till I know them as well as if they had been my intimate friends when they were alive. I know Browning's letters by heart; those sweet letters to the sweet wife. Shakespeare is different. It is so sad that there are no familiar records. One can only think of him as the poet and the creator; genius that touches the supernatural." "I don't think it matters how little you know of the man, his deer-stalking or his tardy marriage, as long as you don't think there was no Shakespeare, and that the noblest poetry this world ever saw was written by the skunk who gave away his friend," said her husband. "Bacon! Horrible!" On one quiet evening, when Claude had been with her since his solitary dinner, she said softly: "I sometimes forget all the years, and think you are just the same Cousin Claude who took pity on me at Disbrowe, when I was so shy that other people's kindness only made me miserable. Till you came I used to creep into any corner with a book, rather than mix with my Disbrowe cousins, who were so dreadfully grand and clever."