"Ah, but you'll be able to eat and drink in it," remarked Mr. Hortentius, K.C., dryly. "We shall all dine there, if the dinners are as good as they were in poor Provana's time."
Poor Provana! That was his epitaph in the world. On the marble tomb at San Marco, to which the dead man had been carried—in remembrance of a desire expressed in those distant days when he and Vera wandered in the olive woods—there was nothing but his name, and one word: "Re-united."
Vera had been too ill and too much under the dominion of Lady Okehampton to make the dismal journey with her dead; but she had gone from Rome to San Marco, and had spent a melancholy hour in the secluded corner where the cypress cast its long shadow on Guilia's tomb.
She had stood by the tomb in a kind of stupor, hardly conscious of the present, lost in a long dream of the past, living again through those bright April days, with father and daughter, and hearing again the ineffable tenderness in Mario Provana's voice, as he talked to his dying child. What an abyss of time since those sad, sweet days! And now there was nothing left but a name—
MARIO PROVANA
—here, and in certain hospitals in London and Rome, where there were wards or beds established in memory of Mario Provana.
CHAPTER XXII
Mrs. Rutherford was the fashion in that first year of her second marriage, just as she had been in her London début as Madame Provana. It seemed as if one of the fairies at her christening had given her that inexpressible charm which captivates the crowd, that elusive, indescribable attractiveness which for want of a better name people have agreed to call magnetism. Vera Rutherford was a magnetic woman. Mr. Symeon went about telling people that she had psychic attributes which removed her worlds away from the normal woman, and Miranda, the only, the inimitable dressmaker, told her patronesses that it was a delight to work for Mrs. Rutherford, not because she was rich enough to pay for the wildest flights in millinery, but because her pale, ethereal beauty lent itself to all that was daring and original in the dress-designer's art. "People preach to me about Mrs. Montressor's lovely colouring, and what a joy it must be to invent frocks for her; but those pink and white beauties are difficult," said the dressmaker. "They require much study. A nuance, just the faintest nuance on the wrong side, and your pink and white woman looks vulgar. A wrong shade of blue and the peach complexion becomes purple, but with Mrs. Rutherford's alabaster skin every scheme of colour is possible."
Mrs. Rutherford was a social success, just as Madame Provana had been. Her entertainments were as frequent and as sumptuous as in the old days, when Mario Provana stalked like a stranger through crowded rooms where hardly one face in twenty afforded him a moment's interest. The entertainments were as sumptuous, but they were more original. The tone was lighter, and gilded youth from the Embassies found the house more amusing.