To Dora the vow that she had taken on her wedding-day was a sacred thing. As he knelt at her side in church, Philip had murmured low in her ear: "Before God and man I love you." This had sufficed her, and, following on it, even the words of the Church service pronounced by the priest had seemed almost superfluous. The phrase uttered in that solemn moment had sealed her fate and ordained her line of conduct. Her life belonged to this man. Besides, had she not in firm clear tones given her promise to love, honour, and obey him? To her this was no empty formula--it was an oath; and she had sworn that, come what would, how fatal soever to her personal happiness, she would be loyal to her vow. She prepared to play her new rôle with the ardour which she had always shown in seconding her husband, even in the most trifling affairs of life, quietly effacing herself, satisfied and happy if Philip seemed to appreciate the efforts that she made to please him. Philip left his house in Elm Avenue without even trying to sublet it. He took a house in Belgravia and installed himself there among the aristocracy and plutocracy of London. Mayfair is, perhaps, still more aristocratic and select; but it is sombre, its streets are narrow, and Philip had been too long accustomed to plenty of light to care to bury himself alive in the midst of its dark, depressing-looking streets. Mayfair is to Belgravia what the Rue St. Dominique is to the Avenue des Champs Elysées in Paris. The rent of his house was a thousand a year. When he added what he would have to pay in parish taxes, Queen's taxes, and all those little blessings which endear Great Britain to every true-born Englishman, Philip had to come to the conclusion that his new house would cost him about fifteen hundred pounds a year. He spent some five thousand pounds upon his installation. The furniture was chosen by Dora, who was consulted upon every point. Most of the things from the St. John's Wood house were distributed throughout the new one, but Dora took it upon her to arrange, on the ground floor, behind the dining-room, the library, exactly as it had been arranged in Elm Avenue; not a book, nor a picture, not a photograph, nor a knick-knack was forgotten. Dora had the bump of remembrance. This library would be her favourite room, she said to herself, and she would pass an hour or two every day here among the souvenirs of the happy days lived in the artists' quarter. Near the drawing-room, Philip arranged a room which might have passed for a studio in the eyes of people who see likenesses everywhere. To speak truly, there was no longer a studio.