"It cannot end--it can never end," she told herself. "He loves me too much and I love him better still. It's as good--quite as good, as being married. The Church makes no difference." She thought of her father, remembering how, through the very precepts of that very Church, he had found retribution. So people, who married with the Church's sanction, found retribution too. Some lives were miserable; she had known them. What good had the blessing of the Church been to them? None! Then Traill would return to her and doubts would vanish like shadows that a light disperses. They were happy. She had never conceived of such happiness before. Her mood was one of continual gratitude. She thanked him for everything--if not with lips, then with eyes. "You remind me of a little starved gutter-arab, whenever I give you anything," he once said, when he had brought her back from a theatre in Rome and given her supper in the restaurant of the Quirinale. "Not very complimentary," she replied without objection. "Well--you look at me that way--as if I were giving you God's earth for God's sake. Have you never been happy before in your life?" "Never." "I don't mean particularly like this. Like this, I know you haven't. But any other way?" "No, I don't think I ever have. I went away from home when I was eighteen--I wasn't happy there. Then I had to work too hard." "Then you are a little starved gutter-arab." He took her gently in his arms. "And what do I seem to you--eh? Sort of fairy prince, I suppose, in gold armour." "You seem like God, sometimes," she whispered. He put her away with a stab of conscience--seated her on a chair and looked down at her. "It's silly to talk like that," he said evenly. "If there is a God--and I suppose there is--the world spends a heap of money in fostering the idea--then He's certainly more consistent in His being than I am--though consistency always seems to me His weak point. But you've not got to idealize me, you know. You remember what I once said to you--don't you?" "What was that?" "There's a beast in every man, thank God!" "Yes--I don't think I shall ever forget that." "Well--don't," he added. But even this did not harbour in her mind. She wrote long, impulsive letters to Janet, pouring out a flood of description of all the places which they visited, opening her heart of its perfect happiness. "You said he was hard once," she wrote from Florence. "You said you knew he was hard. He's never said a hard thing to me the whole time we've been away. He may be hard to other people. I've seen him awfully bitter sometimes, but never to me. We are in love, you see. We shall always be in love. Dear, dear old Janet, I wish you could be with us." Janet took a deep breath when she had finished the reading of that letter, and when Mrs. Hewson pushed some shrimps on to her plate, she pulled the shells from them with impatient energy.