"And are they really going to live in the house in Portland Place?"
"Really, really. Where could they get such rooms, such air and space? And that old Italian furniture is priceless. There is nothing better in the Doria Palace. It took the Provana family more than a century to collect it—even with their wealth."
"Well, when I saw the painters at work outside I thought the house must have been sold. This world seems full of strange people. How Vera can reconcile herself to life in that house passes my comprehension. I could understand her keeping the furniture; but to live inside those four walls. I should fancy they were closing in upon me, like a mediæval torture chamber."
"Vera is all poetry and imagination, but she is not morbid."
"Vera knows that we are in the midst of the unseen, and that our dead are always near us," said a thrilling voice, and Lady Fanny Ransom's dark eyes flashed across the table. "The house can make no difference to her. If she loved her first husband she has not lost him."
"Nice for her, but not so pleasant for her second," murmured a matter-of-fact K.C.
"She was utterly devoted to poor Provana," protested Susie, "but it was the reverent looking-up kind of love that an innocent girl feels for a man old enough to be her father. She has told me the story of their courtship—so sweet—like Paul and Virginia."
"A middle-aged Paul! I thought Rutherford was the hero of the Paul and Virginia chapter of her history."
"Oh, well, they were little lovers as children, and Vera and Claude are the most ideal couple that ever the world has seen. They are going to entertain in a sumptuous style. Their house will be the most popular in London."
"In spite of its being the scene of an unsolved mystery and undiscovered crime. That's the worst of it," said sour middle-age in a garnet necklace. "For my part, I could never sleep a wink in that awful house."