"And you will never take the liberty I give you for a letter of license?" "No, no, no. But I don't ask for liberty. I want to belong to you, to be sheltered by you." "You shall have the shelter, if you need it; but be true to yourself, and you will need no defender. A woman's safest armour is her own purity. And again, my love," with a return of the slightly ironical smile, "never was a woman better guarded than you are while you are fringed round by Disbrowes, protected at every point by your mother's clan, people at once well born and well bred, with no taint of Bohemianism, unless indeed it may lurk in your _poco curante_ cousin, the young painter who made such a lamentable failure of your portrait." She felt as if every vestige of colour was fading out of her face, and that even her lips must be deadly white. They were so parched that when she tried to shape some trivial reply the power of speech seemed gone. She felt the dry lips moving; but no sound came. This was the end of her appeal to the husband whose love might have saved her. Their relations were changed from that hour. He was not again the lover-husband of their honeymoon years; but he was no longer cold and reserved, he no longer held her at a distance. He was kind and sympathetic. He interested himself in her occupations and amusements, the books she read and the people she saw. He was with her at the opera, where Claude Rutherford sometimes came to them and sat through an act or two in the darkness at the back of the box. He was infinitely kind and tender; but it was the tenderness of a father, or a benevolent uncle, rather than of a husband. He held rigidly to that which he had told her. There was to be no make-believe in their relations. If she was not happy, she was at peace for some time after her husband's home-coming--a period in which they were more together than they had ever been since those first years of their married life. She tried to be happy, tried to forget the time in which Claude Rutherford had been her daily companion, the time when she planned no pleasure that he was not to share, and had no opinions about people or places, or books or art, that she did not take from him: loving the things he loved, hating the things he hated; as if they had been two bodies moved by one mind. She tried not to feel an aching void for want of him; she tried not to think him cruel for coming to her house so seldom, and tried to be sorry that they met so often in the houses of her friends. The time came when the awakened conscience was lulled to sleep, and when her husband's society began to jar upon her strained nerves. She had invoked him as a defence against the enemy; and now she longed for the enemy, and had ceased to be grateful to the defender.