Let her be happy in her own way. He had sworn to make her happy: and if it was her nature to delight in trivial things, if the aimless existence of a rich man's sultana was her idea of bliss, she should reign sole mistress of a harem which he would never enter while he believed himself unwelcome there. Vera accepted this gradual drifting apart as something inevitable, for which she was not to blame. The strong man's impassioned love, which had appealed to the romantic side of her character, had languished and died with the passing years. She brooded on the change with sorrowful wonder before she became accustomed to the idea that the lover who had taken her to his heart with a cry of ineffable rapture had ceased to exist in the grave man of business, whose preoccupied manner and absent gaze, as of one looking at things far away, chilled her when she sat opposite him on those rare occasions when they dined _tête-à-tête_--occasions when the dinner-table was only a glittering spot in the dark spaciousness of the room, a world of shadows, where the footmen moved like ghosts in the area between the table and the far-off sideboard. They had been married six years; but Vera thought sadly that her husband looked twenty years older than the companion by whose side she had climbed the mule-paths, through the lemon orchards and olive woods of San Marco, the man whose conversation had always interested her, her first friend, her first lover. She accepted the change as inevitable, having been taught by the wives of her acquaintance to believe that marriage was the death of love, and as gradually as she learned to dispense with her husband's society, so guiltlessly, because unconsciously, she came to depend upon Claude Rutherford for sympathy and companionship. She did not know that she loved him, though she knew that the day when they did not meet seemed a long-drawn-out weariness, and that when the evening shadows came, they brought a sense of desolation and a strange lassitude, as of one weighed down by intolerable burdens. All occupations and all amusements were burdens if Claude was not sharing them--Society the heaviest of all. Far easier to endure the dreary day in the solitude of her den, with the faces of her beloved dead looking at her, than among empty-headed people, who could only talk of what other empty-headed people were doing, or were going to do, with that light spice of malice which makes other people's mistakes and misfortunes so piquant and interesting. Claude Rutherford had become a part of her life, and life was meaningless without him: a fatal stage in the downhill path, but it was a long time before her awakened conscience gave the first note of warning.