It needed more than common cleverness and tact to bring about a change in their manner of life, without making a direct appeal to Rutherford's honour and telling him that their friendship had become a danger. To do this would be to tell him that she loved him, to confess her weakness, before he had passed the border line that divides the friend from the lover. No, she could make no appeal to the man whose smouldering fires she feared to kindle into flame. She knew that he loved her, and that he had made her love him. She had to escape from the web that he had woven round her; and she had, if possible, to set herself free without his knowing the strength of her purpose, or the desperate nature of the struggle. All the chances were against her. She could not forbid him the house without an open scandal. As he had come and gone in the last four years, he must still be free to come and go. She could only avoid those familiar hours--hours that had been so dear--by living in a perpetual restlessness, always finding some engagement away from home. It was weary work, but she persevered, and enlisted all the Disbrowes in her cause, unconscious that they were being made use of. She accepted every invitation, lent herself to everybody's fads, philanthropic or otherwise; listened to the same fiddlers and singers day after day, in drawing-rooms and among people that she knew by heart; or stood with aching head under a ten-guinea hat, selling programmes at amateur theatricals. She contracted a closer alliance with Lady Susan Amphlett, and planned excursions: a day at Windsor, a day at Dorking, at Guildford, to rummage in furniture shops, at Greenwich to see the Nelson relics, to Richmond and Hampton, even to Kew Gardens. Lady Susan was almost worn out by these simple pleasures; but as she professed, and sincerely, an absolute _culte_ for Vera Provana, she held out bravely. These excursions were fairly successful, and as Vera took care that no one should know where she and her friend were going--not even Susan herself till they were on the road--it was not possible for Claude to follow her. It was otherwise in the houses of her friends, where she was always meeting him, and where it was essential that she should not seem to avoid him, least of all to let him see that she was so doing. She greeted him always with the old friendliness--a little more cousinly than it had been of late; and she showed a matronly interest in his health and occupations, as if she had been an aunt rather than a cousin. "It is quite delightful to meet you here this afternoon," he told her, in a ducal house where guinea tickets for a charity concert seemed cheap to the outside public. "You are to be met anywhere and everywhere except in your own house. I have called so often that I have taken a disgust for your knockers. When I am dead I believe those lions' heads will be found engraven on my heart, like Queen Mary's Calais."