This was how Vera reasoned, sitting in her lonely sanctuary, while on the other side of the wall there was a man of mature age, a man with a proud temper and a passionate heart, a man who had endured slights in his youth, whose first marriage had ended in disappointment, the crushing discovery that the beautiful girl who had been given to him by a noble and needy father had sacrificed her inclinations for the sake of her family, and had never loved him. She had been faithful, and she had endured his love. That was all. And in those last years, when disease had laid a withering hand upon her beauty, and when the world seemed far off, and when only her husband's love stood between her and death, she had learnt the value of a good man's devotion, and had loved him a little in return. He had suffered the disillusions of that first union. Yet again, after many years, he had staked his happiness upon a single chance, and had taken a girl of eighteen to his heart, in a state of exaltation that was more like a dream than sober reality. He had lavished upon this unsophisticated girl all the force of strong feelings long held in check. At last, at last, in the maturity of manhood, the love that had been denied to his youth was being given to him in full measure. He could not doubt that she loved him. That innocent, unconscious love, trusting as the love of children, revealed itself in tones and looks that he could not mistake. Before he asked her to be his wife he was sure that she loved him; but after six years of marriage he was no longer sure of anything, except that his wife was the fashion, and that her Disbrowe relations were innumerable. He was sure of nothing about this girl whom he had clasped to his breast in a rapture of triumphant love, on the hill above the Mediterranean. Year after year of their married life had carried her farther away from him. Who could say precisely what made the separation? He only knew that the years which should have tightened the bond had loosened it; and that he could no longer recognise his child-wife of their Roman honeymoon in the fragile _ennuyée_ whom Society had chosen to adore. CHAPTER VII "Well, now your whim has been gratified, I should like to know what you think of Francis Symeon?" Claude Rutherford asked, as he put down his hat in Vera's sanctum, the day after her conference with the high priest of occultism. The question was his only greeting. He slipped into the low and spacious chair by the hearth, and seemed to lose himself in it, while he waited for a reply. He had the air of being perfectly at home in the room, with no idea that he could possibly be unwelcome. He came and went in Madame Provana's house with a lazy insouciance that many people would have taken for indifference. Only the skilled reader of men would have detected the hidden fire under that outward serenity of the attractive man, who flirts with any attractive woman of his acquaintance, and cares for none.