After all the pains that had been taken, the picture was a failure. The painter hated it, Provana frankly disapproved; and in the haggard, large-eyed siren smiling over the edge of the fan, Vera could not recognise the face she saw in the glass. "I have been much too long over the thing," Claude told Provana, with slow and languid speech, half indifference, half disgust; "and it is a dismal failure. But I shall do better next time, if Vera will let me make a rapid sketch of her, when the daffodils are in bloom, and we shall be week-ending at Marlow Chase. I could make a picture of her on the hill above the house, in the yellow afternoon light, and among the yellow flowers. I am an open-air painter if I am anything; but I had almost forgotten how to set a palette. I shall work in a friend's studio in the autumn, and I may do better next year." Vera urged him to persevere in this good intention, and not to mind his failure. "I mind nothing," he said. "I have had three happy months. I mind nothing while you are kind, and forgive me for having put you to a lot of trouble, with this atrocious daub for the outcome of it all." Privileged people only were allowed to see the daub; but those, although supposed to be few, in the end proved to be many. Critics were among them, and Mr. Rutherford was too shrewd not to discover that every connoisseur had a little hole to pick in the portrait, and that when all the little holes were put together there was nothing left. And this picture, so poor a thing as it was, made the beginning of that open secret, which everybody knew long before the awakening of Vera's conscience, and while Mario Provana saw nothing to suspect or to fear in his wife's intimacy with her cousin. But now, with the awakening of conscience, began the fight against Fate, the fight of the weak against the strong, the woman against the man, innocent youth against an experienced lover. She was single-hearted and pure in intention, counting happiness as thistledown against gold, when weighed against her honour as a wife; but she entered the lists without knowing the strength of her opponent, the passive force of a weak man's selfishness. The main purpose of her life was henceforward to release herself from the web that had been woven so easily, so imperceptibly; first a careless association between two people whose likings and ideas were in harmony; then friendship, confidence, sympathy; and then unavowed love; love that made the days desolate when the lovers were not together. He had been too frequent and too dear a companion. He had become the master of her life, and it was for her to release herself from that unholy bondage. She had to learn to live without him.