"Often; but we won't talk of that, Vera," taking her hand suddenly. "I have a question to ask you, and the longer I think about it, the more difficult it will seem--a question that means my future existence. I can't wait for eloquent speech. I have no words to-day. Vera, will you be my wife?" She looked at him as if she thought he was joking. "Yes, it has come to that. My happiness depends upon a girl of eighteen, who thinks that such an offer must be a jest--something to laugh at when she tells Grannie how foolish Signor Provana was this afternoon. For me it is life or death. In all those days that we were together last year never a thought of love came into my mind. I watched the two faces side by side, and wondered which was the lovelier, but my mind was too full of sorrow for any other feeling than gratitude to the girl who helped to make those last days happy for my dearest. She was my dearest, the only creature I had cared for since her mother's death. There was no room in my heart for anything but the father's despairing affection for the child he was soon to lose. It was when I met you by my darling's grave that your face came back to me with a strange flash of joy, unexpected, incomprehensible. I had thought of you seldom in the half year that had parted us; yet in that moment it seemed to me that I had been longing for you all the time. And the next day, and the next, with every hour that we were together, with every time I looked into your sweet face, the more I realised that the happiness of all my days to come depended upon you. My love did not expand like a flower creeping slowly through dull earth into beauty and light. It rose like a flame, instantaneous, unquenchable. "Will you make me happy, Vera? Will you trust your life to me? Answer, love, can you trust me?" Her murmured "Yes" was the nearest thing to silence; but he heard it, and she was folded in his arms, and felt with a sudden thrill what it was to be loved with all the strength of a man's passionate heart. CHAPTER IV Shadows of a November twilight are gathering in the two great drawing-rooms of the largest house in Portland Place, rooms that have the grandeur of space, and a certain gloomy splendour that has nothing in common with the caprices and elegances of a modern London drawing-room. The furniture is large and massive. There are tables in Florentine mosaic; cabinets of ebony inlaid with ivory; dower-chests painted by Paul Veronese or his pupils; the richness of arts that are dead; walls hung with Italian tapestry, the work of cloistered nuns whose fingers have been lying in the dust for three centuries; silver lamps suggestive of mortuary chapels. "I love the Provana drawing-rooms because they are romantic, and I hate them because they give me the horrors," little Lady Susan Amphlett told people.