It seemed to her that, by no fault of hers, there had come a difference in her relations with her husband. He was always kind to her, but he was farther from her than in the first year--the Italian year--which, to look back upon, was still the happiest of her married life. He was absorbed in a business that needed strenuous labour and unflagging care. He had told her that it was not his own interests alone that he had to guard; but the interests of other people. There were thousands of helpless people who would suffer by his loss of fortune, or his loss of prestige. The pinnacle upon which the house of Provana stood was the strong rock of a multitude. A certain anxiety was therefore inevitable throughout his business life. He could never be the holiday husband, sharing all a wife's trivial pleasures, interested in all the nothings that make the sum of an idle woman's existence. Vera accepted the inevitable, and it was only when she began to think the best people rather boring, that she discovered how the distance had widened between herself and her husband. Without a dissentient word, without a single angry look, they had come to be one of those essentially modern couples whose loveless unions Father Cyprian deplored. She thought the blame was with Mario Provana. He had ceased to care for her. Just as she had grown weary of her troops of friends, her husband had wearied of the wife he had chosen after a week's courtship. "He thought he was in love, but he could not really have cared for me," she told herself. "His heart was empty and desolate after the loss of his daughter, and he took me because I was young and had been Giulia's friend."