"You are my dog now, Boroo," she told the terrier, and the small, bright, dark eyes looked up at her with a light that expressed perfect understanding, while the pointed ears quivered with delight. He followed her to the threshold of her bedroom, where she showed him a White, fleecy rug on which he was to sleep, outside her door. He threw himself upon his back, with his four legs in the air, protesting himself her slave; and from that hour he worshipped her, and followed her about her house in abject devotion.
He went with her to Italy. Of course, there would be difficulties about his return to England; but canine quarantine might be ameliorated for a rich man's dog. He became her companion and friend; and it was strange how much he meant in her life. Strange, very strange; for in all the years of folly and self-indulgence she had never given herself a canine favourite. She had seen almost every one of her friends more or less absurdly devoted to some small creature—Griffon, Manchester terrier, Pekinese, Japanese, King Charles, Pomeranian—dogs whose merits seemed in an inverse ratio to their size—or the slaves to some more dignified animal, poodle or chow. She had seen this canine slavery, and had wondered, with a touch of scorn; and now, in the stately spaciousness of the Roman villa, she found herself listening for the patter of the Irish terrier's feet upon the marble floors, and rejoicing when he came bounding across the room, to lay his head upon her knee and express unutterable affection with the exuberance of a rough, hairy tail.
The clue to the mystery came to her suddenly as she sat musing in the firelight, with Boroo stretched at her feet.
She had wanted this dog. She had wanted some warm-hearted creature to love her, and to be loved by her. It had been the vacant house of her life that called for an inhabitant. She had awakened from her fever-dream of happiness, to find herself alone, utterly alone, in a world of which she was weary. Claude Rutherford was of no more account to her. The thing that had happened was something worse than drifting apart. Gradually and imperceptibly the distance between them had widened, until she had begun to ask herself if she had ever loved him.
Boroo went with his mistress on the long journey to San Marco, and behaved with an admirable discretion at the big hotel at Marseilles, where, though he would have liked to try conclusions with a stalwart dogue de Bordeaux that he met in one of the long corridors, he contented himself with a passing growl as he crept after Vera to his post outside her room. All things were strange to him in these first continental experiences; but he bore all things with sublime restraint, concentrating all his brain-power and all his emotional force on the one supreme duty of guarding the lovely lady who had adopted him.
At the Hôtel des Anglais Mrs. Rutherford was received with rapture, and the spacious suite on the first floor was, as it were, laid at her feet. She would, of course, occupy those rooms, and no other; the rooms where Signor Provana and his sweet young daughter had lived. Signor Canincio ignored the fact that the sweet young daughter had also died there.
No. Mrs. Rutherford would have the rooms in which she had lived with her grandmother.
"I want our old rooms, please," she said.
"The rooms in which you were so happy—where you spent two winters with the illustrious Lady Felicia."
Signor Canincio at once perceived how natural it was for Madame to prefer those rooms. Everything should be made ready immediately. His season had not yet begun; but his hotel would be full to overflowing in December, when he expected many of Madame's old friends to settle down for the winter. Vera smiled as she remembered those "old friends" with whom she had never been friendly; the sour spinsters and widows who had always resented Lady Felicia's determination to deny herself the advantage of their society.