"The Villa Provana."
The financier's palace still bore the stamp of mercantile riches. Claude had urged his wife to give the splendid house a splendid name; so that, in the ever-changing society of the Italian capital, the source of all that splendour might be forgotten; but he had urged in vain.
"It was his father's house, and it was my home with him," she said, with a strange look—the look that Claude feared. "While I live it shall never have any other name."
"You are the first woman I ever knew with such a cult of the dismal," he said. "Most widows wish to forget."
"Most widows can forget," she answered.
He turned and left her at the word; and she heard him singing sotto voce as he went along the corridor, "La donna e mobile."
"At least I do not change," she thought.
This had happened in their first winter in Rome—a mere flash of melancholy—soon forgotten in those wild days when the pace was fastest, and when life went by in a hurricane of fashionable pleasures. Visiting and entertaining, opera and theatre and race-course; a rush to Naples to hear a wonderful tenor; to Milan to see the new dancer at the Scala; something new and fatiguing for every week and every day. They were both calmer now, and it may be that both were tired, though it was only Vera who talked openly of weariness.
To-night she was looking lovely; but a Russian savant, who was among the most illustrious of her guests, whispered to his neighbour as she passed them, "She will not live her hundred and forty years."
"I am afraid it is a question of months rather than years," replied his friend, a famous Roman doctor.