"However hard he tries, I don't see how he can run through such a fortune as that," his friends said.
"That kind of quiet, unpretentious man has often a marvellous faculty for getting rid of money," said another; "it oozes out of his pockets without the labour of spending. Rutherford is sure to gamble. A man of that temperament is too idle to find excitement for himself. He wants it ready-made—at the baccarat table, or on the turf."
"Well, it will last him a few years, at the worst, and then he can go into the Charter-house."
The idea of Claude Rutherford going to bed at ten o'clock in the Charter-house made everybody laugh.
The long interval of mourning and probation, of melancholy solitude on Vera's part, and of forced occupation on Claude's, was over: and they two, who in thought and feeling had been long one, were now united in that closer bond which only death or sin can sever. In the intensity of that union it seemed to them as if they had never lived asunder, as if all of their existence that had gone before were no more than a long, dull dream, the grey monotony of life that was less than life, hard and mechanical even in its so-called pleasures.
"I never lived till now," she told him, when she was folded to his heart, in their sumptuous alcove in the great room in Venice, in an hotel that had been a palace, an alcove surrounded with a balustrade, a bed that had been made for a king. "I never lived till now—for now I know that nothing can part us. We belong to each other till death."
"If it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy," he murmured in a low, impassioned voice that soothed her like music.
"And the past is dead," she whispered.
"The past is dead."