"No!" she exclaimed with tremendous emphasis, for she felt as if he were going to wrest her secret from her. "What could happen? But I suppose there must come a time in every woman's life when she has had enough of what the world calls pleasure, when the charm goes out of amusements that repeat themselves year after year; and when one begins to understand the emptiness of a life, occupied only with futilities, when one begins to tire of running after every new thing, actors, dancers, singers, and all the rest of them. I have had enough of that life, Mario; and I want you to help me to do something better with the liberty and the wealth you have given me." "Do you want a mission?" he asked with a faint smile. "That is what women seem to want nowadays." "No, Mario. I want to be happy with you. Your business engagements take you so much away from home, that our lives must be sometimes divided; but not always--we need not be always living a divided life, as we have been in the last three years." A crimson flush swept across her face as she spoke, remembering that these were the years in which Claude Rutherford's influence had grown from a careless comradeship to an absorbing intimacy. Her husband looked at her in silence for a few moments; and his grave smile had now a touch of irony. "Has it dawned upon you at last?" he asked. "Have you discovered that we have been living apart; that we have been man and wife only in name?" "It was not my fault, Mario. It was you who kept aloof." "Not till I saw repulsion--not till I saw aversion." "No, no--never, never, never! I have never forgotten your goodness--never forgotten all I owe you." They had been sitting side by side on the spacious Louis Quatorze sofa, his hand upon her shoulder; but at her last words he started to his feet with a cry of pain. "Yes, that is it--you recognise an obligation. I have given you a fine house, fine clothes, fine friends--and you think you ought to repay me for them by pretending to love me. Vera, that is all over. There must be no more pretending. I can bear a good deal, but I could not bear that. I told you something of my past life before we were married; but I doubt if I told you all its bitterness--all the blind egotism of my marriage, the cruel awakening from a dream of mutual love--to discover that my wife had married me because I could give her the things she wanted, and that love was out of the question. I compared myself with other men, and saw the difference; and as I had missed the love of a mother, so I had to do without the love of a wife. I was not made to win a woman's love--no, not even a mother's. This was why my affection for my daughter was something more than the common love of fathers. She was the first who loved me--and she will be the last." "Mario, you are too cruel! Have I not loved you?"