On which there followed a rattling catalogue of matrimonial failures in the artist world, amusing enough—perhaps a little cruel. Cuningham laughed. Watson, on whom Lord Findon's whole personality seemed to have an effect more irritating than agreeable, fidgeted with his brushes. He struck in presently with the dry remark that artists were not the only persons who made imprudent marriages.

Lord Findon sprang up at once, and changed the subject. His youngest son, the year before, had married the nurse who had pulled him through typhoid—and was still in exile, and unforgiven.

Meanwhile no one had noticed John Fenwick. He stood behind the other two while Lord Findon was talking—frowning sometimes and restless—a movement now and then in lips and body, as though he were about to speak—yet not speaking. It was one of those moments when a man feels a band about his tongue, woven by shyness or false shame, or social timidity. He knows that he ought to speak; but the moment passes and he has not spoken. And between him and the word unsaid there rises on the instant a tiny streamlet of division, which is to grow and broaden with the nights and days, till it flows, a stream of fate, not to be turned back or crossed; and all the familiar fields of life are ruined and blotted out.

Finally, as the great patron was going, Cuningham whispered a word in his ear. Lord Findon turned to Fenwick.

'You're in this house, too? Have you anything you'd let me see?'

Fenwick, flushed and stammering, begged him to walk upstairs. Cuningham's puzzled impression was that he gave the invitation reluctantly, but could not make up his mind not to give it.

They marched upstairs, Lord Findon and Cuningham behind.

'Does he ever sell?' said Lord Findon, in Cuningham's ear, nodding towards the broad shoulders and black head of Watson just in front.

'Not often,' said Cuningham, after a pause.

'How, then, does he afford himself?' said the other, smiling.

'Oh! he has means—just enough to keep him from starving. He's a dear old fellow! He has too many ideas for this wicked world.'

Cuningham spoke with a pleasant loyalty. Lord Findon shrugged his shoulders.

'The ideas are too lugubrious! And this young fellow—this Fenwick—where did you pick him up?'

Cuningham explained.

'A character!—perhaps a genius?' said Findon. 'He has a clever, quarrelsome eye. Unmarried? Good Lord, I hope so, after the way I've been going on.'

Cuningham laughed. 'We've seen no sign of a wife. But I really know nothing about him.'

They were entering the upper room, and at sight of the large picture it contained, Lord Findon exclaimed:

'My goodness!—what an ambitious thing!'

The three men gathered in front of the picture. Fenwick lingered nervously behind them.

'What do you call it?' said Lord Findon, putting up his glasses.

'The "Genius Loci,"' said Fenwick, fumbling a little with the words.

It represented a young woman seated on the edge of a Westmoreland ghyll or ravine. Behind her the white water of the beck flowed steeply down from shelf to shelf; beyond the beck rose far-receding walls of mountain, purple on purple, blue on blue. Light, scantily nourished trees, sycamore or mountain-ash, climbed the green sides of the ghyll, and framed the woman's form. She sat on a stone, bending over a frail new-born lamb upon her lap, whereof the mother lay beside her. Against her knee leaned a fair-haired child. The pitiful concern in the woman's lovely eyes was reflected in the soft wonder of the child's. Both, it seemed, were of the people. The drawing was full of rustical suggestion, touched here and there by a harsh realism that did but heighten the general harmony. The woman's grave comeliness flowered naturally, as it were, out of the scene. She was no model posing with a Westmoreland stream for background. She seemed a part of the fells; their silences, their breezes, their pure waters, had passed into her face.

But it was the execution of the picture which perhaps specially arrested the attention of the men examining it.

'Eclectic stuff!' said Watson to himself, presently, as he turned away—'seen with other men's eyes!'

But on Lord Findon and on Cuningham the effect was of another kind. The picture seemed to them also a combination of many things, or rather of attempts at many things—Burne-Jones' mystical colour—the rustic character of a Bastien-Lepage or a Millet—with the jewelled detail of a fourteenth-century Florentine, so wonderful were the harebells in the foreground, the lichened rocks, the dabbled fleece of the lamb: but they realised that it was a combination that only a remarkable talent could have achieved.

'By Jove!' said Findon, turning on the artist with animation, 'where did you learn all this?'

'I've been painting a good many years,' said Fenwick, his cheeks aglow. 'But I've got on a lot this last six months.'

'I suppose, in the country, you couldn't get properly at the model?'

'No. I've had no chances.'

'Let's all pray to have none,' said Cuningham, good-naturedly. 'I had no notion you were such a swell.'

But his light-blue eyes as they rested on Fenwick were less friendly. His Scotch prudence was alarmed. Had he in truth introduced a genius unawares to his only profitable patron?

'Who is the model, if I may ask?' said Lord Findon, still examining the picture.

The reply came haltingly, after a pause.

'Oh!—some one I knew in Westmoreland.'

The speaker had turned red. Naturally no one asked any further questions. Cuningham noticed that the face was certainly from the same original as the face in the sketch-book, but he kept his observation to himself.

Lord Findon, with the eagerness of a Londoner discovering some new thing, fell into quick talk with Fenwick; looked him meanwhile up and down, his features, bearing, clothes; noticed his North-Country accent, and all the other signs of the plebeian. And presently Fenwick, placed at his ease, began for the first time to expand, became argumentative and explosive. In a few minutes he was laying down the law in his Westmoreland manner—attacking the Academy—denouncing certain pictures of the year—with a flushed, confident face and a gesticulating hand. Watson observed him with some astonishment; Lord Findon looked amused—and pulled out his watch.

'Oh, well, everybody kicks the Academy—but it's pretty strong, as you'll find when you have to do with it.'

'Have you been writing those articles in the Mirror?' said Watson, abruptly.

'I'm not a journalist.' The young man's tone was sulky. He got up and his loquacity disappeared.

'Well, I must be off,' said Lord Findon. 'But you're coming to dinner with me to-morrow night, Cuningham, aren't you? Will you excuse a short invitation'—he turned, after a moment's pause, to Fenwick—'and accompany him? Lady Findon would, I'm sure, be glad to make your acquaintance. St. James's Square—102. All right'—as Fenwick, colouring violently, stammered an acceptance—'we shall expect you. Aurevoir! I'm afraid it's no good to ask you!' The last words were addressed smilingly to Watson, as Lord Findon, with outstretched hand, passed through the door, which Cuningham opened for him.

'Thank you,' said Watson, with a grave inclination—'I'm a hermit.'

The door closed on a gay and handsome presence. Lord Findon could not possibly have been accused of anything so ill-mannered as patronage. But there was in his manner a certain consciousness of power—of vantage-ground; a certain breath of autocracy. The face of Watson showed it as he returned to look closely into Fenwick's picture.

A few minutes later Fenwick found himself alone. He stood in front of the picture, staring into Phoebe's eyes. A wave of passionate remorse broke upon him. He had as good as denied her; and she sat there before him like some wronged, helpless thing. He seemed to hear her voice, to see her lips moving.

Hastily he took her last letter out of his pocket.

'I am glad you're getting on so well, and I'm counting the weeks to Christmas. Carrie kisses your photograph morning and night, but I'm afraid she'll have forgotten you a good deal. Sometimes I'm very weary here—but I don't mind if you're getting on, and if it won't be much longer. Miss Anna has sent me some new patterns for my tatting, and I'm getting a fine lot done. All the visitors are quite gone now, and it's that quiet at nights! Sometimes when it's been raining I think I can hear the Dungeon Ghyll stream, though it's more than a mile away.'

Fenwick put up the letter. He had a sudden vision of Phoebe in her white night-dress, opening the casement-window of the little cottage on a starry night, and listening to the sounds of distant water. Behind her was the small room with its candle—the baby's cot—the white bed, with his vacant place. A pang of longing—of homesickness—stirred him.

Then he began to pace his room, driven by the stress of feeling to take stock of his whole position. He had reached London in May; it was now November. Six months—of the hardest effort, the most strenuous labour he had ever passed through. He looked back upon it with exultation. Never had he been so conscious of expanding power and justified ambition. Through the Berners Street life-school he had obtained some valuable coaching and advice which had corrected faults and put him on the track of new methods. But it was his own right hand and his own brain he had mostly to thank, together with the opportunities of London. Up early, and to bed late—drawing from the model, the antique, still life, drapery, landscape; studying pictures, old and new, and filling his sketch-book in every moment of so-called leisure with the figures and actions of the great city—he had made magnificent use of his time; Phoebe could find no fault with him there.

Had he forgotten her and the babe?—found letters to her sometimes a burden, and his heart towards her dry often and barren? Well, he had written regularly; and she had never complained. Men cannot be like women, absorbed for ever in the personal affections. For him it was the day of battle, in which a man must strain all his powers to the uttermost if any laurels are to be won before evening. His whole soul was absorbed in the stress of it, in the hungry eagerness for fame, and—though in a lesser degree—for money.

Money! The very thought of it filled him with impatient worry. Morrison's hundred was nearly gone. He knew well enough that Phoebe was right when she accused him of managing his money badly. It ran through his fingers loosely, incessantly. He hardly knew now where the next remittances to Phoebe were to come from. At first he had done a certain amount of illustrating work and had generally sent her the proceeds of it. But of late he had been absorbed in his big picture, and there had been few or no small earnings. Perhaps, if he hadn't written those articles to the Mirror, there would have been time for some? Well, why shouldn't he write them? His irritable pride took fire at once at the thought of blame.

No one could say, anyway, that he had spent money in amusement. Why, he had scarcely been out of Bloomsbury!—the rest of London might not have existed for him. A gallery-seat at the Lyceum Theatre, then in its early fame, and hot discussions of Irving and Ellen Terry with such artistic or literary acquaintance as he had made through the life-school or elsewhere—these had been his only distractions. He stood amazed before his own virtues. He drank little—smoked little. As for women—he thought with laughter or wrath of Phoebe's touch of jealousy! There was an extremely pretty girl—a fair-haired, conscious minx—drawing in the same room with him at the British Museum. Evidently she would have been glad to capture him; and he had loftily denied her. If he had ever been as susceptible as Phoebe thought him, he was susceptible no more. Life burned with sterner fire!

And yet, for all these self-denials, Morrison's money and his own savings were nearly gone. Funds might hold out till after Christmas. What then?

He had heard once or twice from Morrison, asking for news of the pictures promised. Lately he had left the letters unanswered; but he lived in terror of a visit. For he had nothing to offer him—neither money nor pictures. His only picture so far—as distinguished from exercises—was the 'Genius Loci.' He had begun that in a moment of weariness with his student work, basing it on a number of studies of Phoebe's head and face he had brought South with him. He had been lucky enough to find a model very much resembling Phoebe in figure; and now, suddenly, the picture had become his passion, the centre of all his hopes. It astonished himself; he saw his artistic advance in it writ large; of late he had been devoting himself entirely to it, wrapt, like the body of Hector, in a heavenly cloud that lifted him from the earth! If the picture sold—and it would surely sell—then all paths were clear. Morrison should be paid; and Phoebe have her rights. Let it only be well hung at the Academy, and well sold to some discriminating buyer—and John Fenwick henceforward would owe no man anything—whether money or favour.

At this point he returned to his picture, grappling with it afresh in a feverish pleasure. He caught up a mirror and looked at it reversed; he put in a bold accent or two; fumed over the lack of brilliancy in some colour he had bought the day before; and ended in a fresh burst of satisfaction. By Jove, it was good! Lord Findon had been evidently 'bowled over' by it—Cuningham too. As for that sour-faced fellow, Watson, what did it matter what he thought?

It must succeed! Suddenly he found himself on his knees beside his picture, praying that he might finish it prosperously, that it might be given a good place in the Academy, and bring him fame and fortune.

Then he got up sheepishly, looking furtively round the room to be sure that the door was shut, and no one had seen him. He was a good deal ashamed of himself, for he was not in truth of a religious mind, and he had, by now, few or no orthodox beliefs. But in all matters connected with his pictures the Evangelical tradition of his youth still held him. He was the descendant of generations of men and women who had prayed on all possible occasions—that customers might be plentiful and business good—that the young cattle might do well, and the hay be got in dry—that their children might prosper—and they themselves be delivered from rheumatism, or toothache, or indigestion. Fenwick's prayer to some 'magnified non-natural man' afar off, to come and help him with his picture, was of the same kind. Only he was no longer whole-hearted and simple about it, as he had been when Phoebe married him, as she was still.

He put on his studio coat and sat down to his work again, in a very tender, repentant mood. What on earth had possessed him to make that answer to Lord Findon—to let him and those other fellows take him for unmarried? He protested, in excuse, that Westmoreland folk are 'close,' and don't like talking about their own affairs. He came of a secretive, suspicious stock; and had no mind at any time to part with unnecessary facts about himself. As talkative as you please about art and opinion; of his own concerns not a word! London had made him all the more cautious and reticent. No one knew anything about him except as an artist. He always posted his letters himself; and he believed that neither his landlady nor anybody else suspected him of a wife.

But to-day he had carried things too far—and a guilty discomfort weighed upon him. What was to be done? Should he on the first opportunity set himself right with Lord Findon—speak easily and unexpectedly of Phoebe and the child? Clearly what would have been simplicity itself at first was now an awkwardness. Lord Findon would be puzzled—chilled. He would suppose there was something to be ashamed of—some skeleton in the cupboard. And especially would he take it ill that Fenwick had allowed him to run on with his diatribes against matrimony as though he were talking to a bachelor. Then the lie about the picture. It had been the shy, foolish impulse of a moment. But how explain it to Lord Findon?

Fenwick stood there tortured by an intense and morbid distress; realising how much this rich and illustrious person had already entered into his day dream. For all his pride as an artist—and he was full of it—his trembling, crude ambition had already seized on Lord Findon as a stepping-stone. He did not know whether he could stoop to court a patron. His own temper had to be reckoned with. But to lose him at the outset by a silly falsehood would be galling. A man who has to live in the world as a married man must not begin by making a mystery of his wife. He felt the social stupidity of what he had done, yet could not find in himself the courage to set it right.

Well, well, let him only make a hit in the Academy, sell his picture, and get some commissions. Then Phoebe should appear, and smile down astonishment. His gaucherie should be lost in his success.

He tossed about that night, sleepless, and thinking of Cuningham's two hundred and fifty pounds—for a picture so cheaply, commonly clever. It filled him with the thirst to arrive. He had more brains, more drawing, more execution—more everything!—than Cuningham. No doubt a certain prudence and tact were wanted—tact in managing yourself and your gifts.

Well!—in spite of Watson's rude remark, what human being knew he was writing those articles in the Mirror? He threw out his challenge to the darkness, and so fell asleep.



CHAPTER IV

Fenwick had never spent a more arduous hour than that which he devoted to the business of dressing for Lord Findon's dinner-party. It was his first acquaintance with dress-clothes. He had, indeed, dined once or twice at the tables of the Westmoreland gentry in the course of his portrait-painting experiences. But there had been no 'party,' and it had been perfectly understood that for the Kendal bookseller's son a black Sunday coat was sufficient. Now, however, he was to meet the great world on its own terms; and though he tried hard to disguise his nervousness from his sponsor, Philip Cuningham, he did not succeed. Cuningham instructed him where to buy a second-hand dress-suit that very nearly fitted him, and he had duly provided himself with gloves and tie. When all was done he put his infinitesimal looking-glass on the floor of his attic, flanked it with two guttering candles, and walked up and down before it in a torment, observing his own demeanour and his coat's, saying 'How d'ye do?' and 'Good-bye' to an imaginary host, or bending affably to address some phantom lady across the table.

When at last he descended the stairs, he felt as though he were just escaped from a wrestling-match. He followed Cuningham into the omnibus with nerves all on edge. He hated the notion, too, of taking an omnibus to go and dine in St. James's Square. But Cuningham's Scotch thriftiness scouted the proposal of a hansom.

On the way Fenwick suddenly asked his companion whether there was a Lady Findon. Cuningham, startled by the ignorance of his protege, drew out as quickly as he could la carte du pays.

Lady Findon, the second wife, fat, despotic, and rich, rather noisy, and something of a character, a political hostess, a good friend, and a still better hater; two sons, silent, good-looking and clever, one in the brewery that provided his mother with her money, the other in the Hussars; two daughters not long 'introduced'—one pretty—the other bookish and rather plain; so ran the catalogue.

'I believe there is another daughter by the first wife—married—something queer about the husband. But I've never seen her. She doesn't often appear—Hullo—here we are.'

They alighted at the Haymarket, and as they walked down the street Fenwick found himself in the midst of the evening whirl of the West End. The clubs were at their busiest; men passed them in dress-suits and overcoats like themselves, and the street was full of hansoms, whence the faces of well-dressed women, enveloped in soft silks and furs, looked out.

Fenwick felt himself treading a new earth. At such an hour he was generally wending his way to a Bloomsbury eating-house, where he dined for eighteenpence; he was a part of the striving, moneyless student-world.

But here, from this bustling Haymarket with its gay, hurrying figures, there breathed new forces, new passions which bewildered him. As he was looking at the faces in the carriages, the jewels and feathers and shining stuffs, he thought suddenly and sharply of Phoebe sitting alone at her supper in the tiny cottage room. His heart smote him a little. But, after all, was he not on her business as well as his own?

The door of Lord Findon's house opened before them. At sight of the liveried servants within, Fenwick's pride asserted itself. He walked in, head erect, as though the place belonged to him.

Lord Findon came pleasantly to greet them as they entered the drawing-room, and took them up to Lady Findon. Cuningham she already knew, and she gave a careless glance and a touch of the hand to his companion. It was her husband's will to ask these raw, artistic youths to dinner, and she had to put up with it; but really the difficulty of knowing whom to send them in with was enormous.

'I am glad to make your acquaintance,' she said, mechanically, to Fenwick, as he stood awkwardly beside her, while her eyes searched the door for a Cabinet Minister and his wife who were the latest guests.

'Thank you; I too am pleased to make yours,' said Fenwick, nervously pulling at his gloves, and furious with his own malaise.

Lady Findon's eyebrows lifted in amusement. She threw him another glance.

Good-looking!—but really Findon should wait till they were a little decrotte.

'I hear your picture is charming,' she said, distractedly; and then, suddenly perceiving the expected figures, she swept forward to receive them.

'Very sorry, my dear fellow, we have no lady for you; but you will be next my daughter, Madame de Pastourelles,' said Lord Findon, a few minutes later, in his ear, passing him with a nod and a smile. His gay, half-fatherly ways with these rising talents were well known. They made part of his fame with his contemporaries; a picturesque element in his dinner-parties which the world appreciated.

Fenwick found his way rather sulkily to the dining-room. It annoyed him that Cuningham had a lady and he had none. His companion on the road downstairs was the private secretary, who tried good-naturedly to point out the family portraits on the staircase wall. But Fenwick scarcely replied. He stalked on, his great black eyes glancing restlessly from side to side; and the private secretary thought him a boor.

As he was standing bewildered inside the dining-room a servant caught hold of him and piloted him to his seat. A lady in white, who was already seated in the next chair, looked up and smiled.

'My father told me we were to be neighbours. I must introduce myself.'

She held out a small hand, which, in his sudden pleasure, Fenwick grasped more cordially than was necessary. She withdrew it smiling, and he sat down, feeling himself an impulsive ass, intimidated by the lights, the flowers, the multitude of his knives and forks, and most of all, perhaps, by this striking and brilliant creature beside him.

Madame de Pastourelles was of middle height, slenderly built, with pale-brown hair, and a delicately white face, of a very perfect oval. She had large, quiet eyes, darker than her hair; features small, yet of a noble outline—strength in refinement. The proud cutting of the nose and mouth gave delight; it was a pride so unconscious, so masked in sweetness, that it challenged without wounding. The short upper lip was sensitive and gay; the eyes ranged in a smiling freedom; the neck and arms were beautiful. Her dress, according to the Whistlerian phrase just coming into vogue, might have been called an 'arrangement in white.' The basis of it seemed to be white velvet; and breast and hair were powdered with diamonds delicately set in old flower-like shapes.

'You are in the same house with Mr. Cuningham?' she asked, when a dean had said grace and the soup was served. Her voice was soft and courteous; the irritation in Fenwick felt the soothing of it.

'I am on the floor above.'

'He paints charming things.'

Fenwick hesitated.

'You think so?' he said, bluntly, turning to look at her.

She coloured slightly and laughed.

'Do you mean to put me in the Palace of Truth?'

'Of course I would if I could,' said Fenwick, also laughing. 'But I suppose ladies never say quite what they mean.'

'Oh yes, they do. Well, then, I am not much enamoured of Mr. Cuningham's pictures. I like him, and my father likes his painting.'

'Lord Findon admires that kind of thing?'

'Besides a good many other kinds. Oh! my father has a dreadfully catholic taste. He tells me you haven't been abroad yet?'

Fenwick acknowledged it.

'Ah, well; of course you'll go. All artists do—except'—she dropped her voice—'the gentleman opposite.'

Fenwick looked, and beheld a personage scarcely, indeed, to be seen at all for his very bushy hair, whiskers, and moustache, from which emerged merely the tip of a nose and a pair of round eyes in spectacles. As, however, the hair was of an orange colour and the eyes of a piercing and pinlike sharpness, the eclipse of feature was not a loss of effect. And as the flamboyant head was a tolerably familiar object in the shop-windows of the photographers and in the illustrated papers, Fenwick recognised almost immediately one of the most popular artists of the day—Mr. Herbert Sherratt.

Fenwick flushed hotly.

'Lord Findon doesn't admire his work?' he said, almost with fierceness, turning to his companion.

'He hates his pictures and collects his drawings.'

'Drawings!' Fenwick shrugged his shoulders. 'Anybody can make a clever drawing. It's putting on the paint that counts. Why doesn't he go abroad?'

'Oh, well, he does go to Holland. But he thinks Italian painting all stuff, and that so many Madonnas and saints encourage superstition. But what's the use of talking? They have to station a policeman beside his picture in the Academy to keep off the crowd. Hush-sh! He is looking this way.'

She turned her head, and Fenwick feared she was lost to him. He managed to get in another question. 'Are there any other painters here?'

She pointed out the president of the Academy, a sculptor, and an art-critic, at whose name Fenwick curled his lip, full of the natural animosity of the painter to the writer.

'And, of course, you know my neighbour?'

Fenwick looked hastily, and saw a very handsome youth bending forward to answer a question which Lord Findon had addressed to him from across the table; a face in the 'grand style'—almost the face of a Greek—pure in outline, bronzed by foreign suns, and lit by eyes expressing so strong a force of personality that, but for the sweetness with which it was tempered, the spectator might have been rather repelled than won. When the young man answered Lord Findon, the voice was, like the face, charged—perhaps over-charged—with meaning and sensibility.

'I took Madame de Pastourelles to see it to-day,' the youth was saying. 'She thought it as glorious as I did.'

'Oh! you are a pair of enthusiasts,' said Lord Findon. 'I keep my head.'

The 'it' turned out to be a Titian portrait from the collection of an old Roman family, lately brought to London and under offer to the National Gallery, of which Lord Findon was a trustee.

Madame de Pastourelles looked towards her father, confirming what the unknown youth had said. Her eyes had kindled. She began to talk rapidly in defence of her opinion. Between her, Lord Findon, and her neighbour there arose a conversation which made Fenwick's ears tingle. How many things and persons and places it touched upon that were wholly unknown to him! Pictures in foreign museums—Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg—the names of French or German experts—quotations from Italian books or newspapers—the three dealt lightly and familiarly with a world in which Fenwick had scarcely a single landmark. How clever she was! how charming! What knowledge without a touch of pedantry! And how the handsome youth kept up with her—nay, rather, led her, with a mastery, a resource, to which she always yielded in case of any serious difference of opinion! It seemed that they had been abroad together—had seen many sights in each other's company—had many common friends.

Fenwick felt himself strangely sore and jealous as he listened. Who was this man? Some young aristocrat, no doubt, born silver spoon in mouth—one of your idle, insolent rich, with nothing to do but make a hobby of art, and patronise artists. He loathed the breed.

Her voice startled him back from these unspoken tirades, and once more he found her eyes fixed upon him. It provoked him to feel that their scrutiny made him self-conscious—anxious to please. They were so gentle, so gay!—and yet behind the first expression there sat what seemed to him the real personality, shrewd, critical, and remote.

'You must see this picture,' she said, kindly. 'It's glorious!'

'Where is it?'

'In a house near here. But father could get you in.'

He hesitated, then laughed, ungraciously.

'I don't seem to have finished yet with the National Gallery. Who—please—is the gentleman on your right?'

She smiled.

'Oh! don't you know him? You must let me introduce him. It is Mr. Arthur Welby. Doesn't he talk well?'

She introduced them. Welby received the introduction with a readiness—a touch of eagerness indeed—which seemed to show a mind favourably prepared for it.

'Lord Findon tells me you're sending in a most awfully jolly thing to the Academy!' he said, bending across Madame de Pastourelles, his musical voice full of cordiality. Fenwick made a muttered reply. It might have been thought he disliked being talked to about his own work. Welby accordingly changed the subject at once; he returned to the picture he had been pressing on Lord Findon.

'Haven't you seen it? You really should.' But this elicited even less response. Fenwick glared at him—apparently tongue-tied. Then Madame de Pastourelles and her neighbour talked to each other, endeavouring to draw in the stranger. In vain. They fell back, naturally, into the talk of intimates, implying a thousand common memories and experiences; and Fenwick found himself left alone.

His mind burned with annoyance and self-disgust. Why did he let these people intimidate him? Why was he so ridiculously self-conscious?—so incapable of holding his own? He knew all about Arthur Welby; his name and fame were in all the studios. The author of the picture of the year—in the opinion, at least, of the cultivated minority for whom rails and policemen were not the final arbiters of merit; glorified in the speeches at the Academy banquet; and already overwhelmed with more commissions than he could take—Welby should have been one of the best hated of men. On the contrary, his mere temperament had drawn the teeth of that wild beast, Success. Well-born, rich, a social favourite, trained in Paris and Italy, an archaeologist and student as well as a painter, he commanded the world as he pleased. Society asked him to dinners, and he gave himself no professional airs and went when he could. But among his fellows he lived a happy comrade's life, spending his gifts and his knowledge without reserve, always ready to help a man in a tight place, to praise a friend's picture, to take up a friend's quarrel. He took his talent and his good-fortune so simply that the world must needs insist upon them, instead of contesting them.

As for his pictures, they were based on the Italian tradition—rich, accurate, learned, full of literary allusion and reminiscence. In Fenwick's eyes, young as was their author, they were of the past rather than of the future. He contemptuously thought of them as belonging to a dead genre. But the man who painted them could draw.

Meanwhile he seemed to have lost Madame de Pastourelles, and must needs fall back on the private secretary beside him. This gentleman, who had already entered him on the tablets of the mind as a mannerless outsider, was not particularly communicative. But at least Fenwick learned the names of the other guests. The well-known Ambassador beside Lady Findon, with a shrewd, thin, sulky face, and very black eyes under whitish hair—eyes turned much more frequently on the pretty actress to his right than upon his hostess; a financier opposite, much concerned with great colonial projects; the Cabinet Minister—of no account, it seemed, either in the House or the Cabinet—and his wife, abnormally thin, and far too discreet for the importance of her husband's position; a little farther, the wife of the red-haired Academician, a pale, frightened creature who looked like her husband's apology, and was in truth his slave;—all these he learned gradually to discriminate.

So this was the great world. He was stormily pleased to be in it, and at the same time scornful of it. It seemed to contain not a few ancient shams and hollow pretenders—

Ah! once more the soft, ingratiating voice beside him. Madame de Pastourelles was expressing a flattering wish to see his picture, of which her father had talked so much.

'And he says you have found such a beautiful model—or, rather, better than beautiful—characteristic.'

Fenwick stared at her. It was on the tip of his tongue to say 'She is my wife.' But he did not say it. He imagined her look of surprise—'Ah, my father had no idea!'—imagined it with a morbid intensity, and saw no way of confronting or getting round it; not at the dinner-table, anyway—with all these eyes and ears about him—above all, with Lord Findon opposite. Why, they might think he had been ashamed of Phoebe!—that there was some reason for hiding her away. It was ridiculous—most annoying and absurd; but now that the thing had happened, he must really choose his own moment for unravelling the coil.

So he stammered something unintelligible about a 'Westmoreland type,' and then hastily led the talk to some other schemes he had in mind. With the sense of having escaped a danger he found his tongue for the first time, and the power of expressing himself.

Madame de Pastourelles listened attentively—drew him out, indeed—made him show himself to the best advantage. And presently, at a moment of pause, she said, with a smile and a shrug, 'How happy you are to have an art! Now I—'

She let her hand fall with a little plaintive movement.

'I am sure you paint,' said Fenwick, eagerly.

'No.'

'Then you are musical?'

'Not at all. I embroider—'

'All women should,' said Fenwick, trying for a free and careless air.

'I read—'

'You do not need to say it.'

She opened her eyes at this readiness of reply; but still pursued:

'And I have a Chinese pug.'

'And no children?' The words rose to Fenwick's lips, but remained unspoken. Perhaps she divined them, for she began hastily to describe her dog—its tricks and fidelities. Fenwick could meet her here; for a mongrel fox-terrier—taken, a starving waif, out of the streets—had been his companion since almost the first month of his solitude. Each stimulated the other, and they fell into those legends of dog-life in which every dog-lover believes, however sceptical he may be in other directions. Till presently she said, with a sigh and a stiffening of her delicate features:

'But mine shows some symptoms of paralysis. He was run over last summer. I'm afraid it will be long and painful.'

Fenwick replied that she should send for the vet. and have the dog painlessly killed.

'No. I shall nurse him.'

'Why should you look on at suffering?'

'Why not—if sometimes he enjoys life?'

'I am thinking of the mistress.'

'Oh, for us,' she said, quickly, 'for me—it is good to be with suffering.'

As she spoke, she drew herself slightly more erect. Neither tone nor manner showed softness, made any appeal. The words seemed to have dropped from her, and the strange pride and dignity she at once threw around them made a veiling cloud through which only a man entirely without the finer perceptions would have tried to penetrate. Fenwick, for all his surface gaucherie, did not attempt it. But he attacked her generalisation. With some vehemence he developed against it a Neo-pagan doctrine of joy—love of the earth and its natural pleasures—courage to take and dare—avoidance of suffering—and war on asceticism. He poured out a number of undigested thoughts, which showed a great deal of reading, and at least betrayed a personality, whatever value they might have as a philosophy.

She listened with a charming kindness, laughing now and then, putting in a humorous comment or two, and never by another word betraying her own position. But he was more and more conscious of the double self in her—of the cultivated, social self she was bringing into play for his benefit, and of something behind—a spirit watchful and still—wrapt in a great melancholy—or perhaps a great rebellion? And by this sense of something concealed or strongly restrained, she began to affect his imagination, and so, presently, to absorb his attention. Something exquisite in her movements and looks, also in the quality of her voice and the turn of her phrases, drew from his own crude yet sensitive nature an excited response. He began to envisage what these highly trained women of the upper class, these raffinees of the world, may be for those who understand them—a stimulus, an enigma, an education.

It flashed on him that women of this type could teach him much that he wanted to know; and his ambition seized on the idea. But what chance that she would ever give another thought to the raw artist to whom her father had flung a passing invitation?

He made haste, indeed, to prove his need of her or some other Egeria; for she was no sooner departed with the other ladies than he came to mischief. Left alone with the gentlemen, his temperament asserted itself. He had no mind in any company to be merely a listener. Moreover, that slight, as he regarded it, of sending him down without a lady, still rankled; and last, but not least, he had drunk a good deal of champagne, to which he was quite unaccustomed. So that when Lord Findon fell into a discussion with the Ambassador of Irving's Hamlet and Othello, then among the leading topics of London—when the foreigner politely but emphatically disparaged the English actor and Lord Findon with zeal defended him—who should break into the august debate but this strong-browed, black-eyed fellow, from no one knew where, whose lack of some of the smaller conventions had already been noticed by a few of the company.

At first all looked well. A London dinner-party loves novelty, and is always ready to test the stranger within its gates. Fenwick slipped into the battle as a supporter of Lord Findon's argument, and his host with smiling urbanity welcomed him to the field. But in a few minutes the newcomer had ravaged the whole of it. The older men were silenced, and Fenwick was leaning across the table, gesticulating with one hand, and lifting his port-wine with the other, addressing now Lord Findon and now the Ambassador—who stared at him in amazement—with an assurance that the world only allows to its oldest favourites. Lord Findon in vain tried to stop him.

'Didn't know this was to be a dinner with speeches,' murmured the financier, after a few minutes, in his neighbour's ear. 'Think I'll get up and propose a vote of thanks to the chairman.'

'There ought, at least, to be a time-limit,' said the neighbour, with a shrug. 'Where on earth did Findon pick him up?'

'I say, what an awfully rum chap!' said the young son of the house—wondering—to Arthur Welby. 'What does he talk like that for?'

'He doesn't talk badly,' said Welby, whose mouth showed the laughter within.

Meanwhile Fenwick—loud-voiced, excited—had brought his raid to a climax by an actual attack upon the stately Frenchman opposite, whose slight sarcastic look pricked him intolerably. All other conversation at the table fell dumb.

Lord Findon coloured, and rose.

'You are a great deal more sure of my own opinion than I am myself,' he said, coldly. 'I am much obliged to you, but—shall we adjourn this conversation?'

As the men walked upstairs, Fenwick realised that he had blundered; he felt himself isolated and in disfavour. Arthur Welby had approached him, but Lord Findon had rather pointedly drawn an arm through Welby's and swept him away. No one else spoke to him, and even the private secretary, who had before befriended him, left him severely alone. None of the ladies in the drawing-room upstairs showed, as it seemed to him, any desire for his company, and he was reduced to looking at a stand of miniatures near the door, while his heart swelled fiercely. So this was what society meant?—a wretched pleasure purchased on degrading terms! A poor dependant like himself, he supposed, was to be seen and not heard—must speak when he was spoken to, play chorus, and whisper humbleness. As to meeting these big-wigs on equal terms, that clearly was not expected. An artist may be allowed to know something about art; on any other subject let him listen to his betters.

He said to himself that he was sick of the whole business; and he would gladly have slipt through the open door down the stairs, and out of the house. He was restrained, however, by the protest of a sore ambition which would not yet admit defeat. Had he set Lord Findon against him?—ruined the chance of a purchaser for his picture and of a patron for the future? Out of the corner of his eye he saw Cuningham, neat, amiable, and self-possessed, sitting in a corner by Lady Findon, who smiled and chatted incessantly. And it was clear to him that Welby was the spoilt child of the room. Wherever he went men and women grouped themselves about him; there was a constant eagerness to capture him, an equal reluctance to let him go.

'Well, I'm as good as he—as either of them,' thought Fenwick fiercely, as he handled a Cosway. 'Only they can talk these people's lingo, and I can't. I can paint as well as they any day—and I'll be bound, if they let me alone, I could talk as well. Why do people ask you to their houses and then ill-treat you? Damn them!'

Meanwhile, Lord Findon had had a few whispered words with his daughter in an inner room.

'My dear!'—throwing up his hands—'a barbarian! Can't have him here again.'

'Mr. Fenwick, papa?'

'Of course. Cuningham ought to have warned me. However, I suppose I brought it on myself. I do these rash things, and must pay for them. He was so rude to De Chailles that I have had to apologise.'

'Poor papa! Where is he?'

'In the other room—looking at things. Better leave him alone.'

'Oh no; he'll feel himself neglected.'

'Well, let him. A man ought to be made to understand that he can't behave like that.'

'What did he do?'

'My dear, he spoiled the whole business after dinner—harangued the table!—as good as told De Chailles he had no right to talk about Irving or Shakespeare, being a foreigner. You never saw such an exhibition!'

'Poor Mr. Fenwick. I must go and talk to him.'

'Eugenie, don't be a goose. Why should you take any trouble about him?'

'He's wonderfully clever, papa. And clever people are always getting into scrapes. Somebody must take him in hand.'

And, rising, she threw her father a whimsical backward look as she departed. Lord Findon watched her with mingled smiles and chagrin. How charmingly she was dressed to-night—his poor Eugenie! And how beautifully she moved!—with what grace and sweetness! As he turned to do his duty by an elderly countess near him, he stifled a sigh—that was also an imprecation.

It had often been said of Eugenie de Pastourelles that she possessed a social magic. She certainly displayed it on this occasion. Half an hour later Lord Findon, who was traversing the drawing-rooms after having taken the Ambassadress to her carriage, found a regenerate and humanised Fenwick sitting beside his daughter; the centre, indeed, of a circle no less friendly to untutored talent than the circle of the dinner-table had been hostile. Lord Findon stopped to listen. Really the young man was now talking decently!—about matters he understood; Burne-Jones, Rossetti—some French pictures in Bond Street—and so forth. The ruffled host was half appeased, half wroth. For if he could make this agreeable impression, why such a superfluity of naughtiness downstairs? And the fellow had really some general cultivation; nothing like Welby, of course—where would you find another Arthur Welby?—but enough to lift him above the mere journeyman. After all, one must be indulgent to these novices—with no traditions behind them—and no—well, to put it plainly—no grandfathers! And so, with reflexions of this kind, the annoyance of a good-natured man subsided.

It was all Eugenie's doing, of course. She and Welby between them had caught the bear, tamed him, and set him to show whatever parlour tricks he possessed. Just like her! He hoped the young man understood her condescension—and that to see her and talk with her was a privilege. Involuntarily Lord Findon glanced across the room, at the decollete shoulders and buxom good looks of his wife. When Eugenie was in the house the second Lady Findon never seemed to him well dressed.

When Fenwick and Cuningham had departed—Fenwick in a glow of grateful good-humour, expressing himself effusively to his host—Madame de Pastourelles approached her father, smiling.

'That youth has asked me to sit to him.'

'The audacious rascal!' cried Lord Findon, fuming. 'He has never seen you before—and, besides, how does any one know what he can do?'

'Why, you said yourself his picture was remarkable.'

'So it is. But what's one picture? What do you think, Welby?' he said, impulsively addressing the man beside him. 'Wasn't it like his impudence?'

Welby smiled.

'Like Eugenie's kindness! It was rather charming to see his look when she said "Yes"!'

'You said "Yes"!' Lord Findon stared at her.

'Come with me and see what he can do in a morning.' She laid a quieting hand on her father's arm. 'You know that always amuses you. And I want to see his picture.'

'His picture is not bad,' said Lord Findon, with decision.

'I think you will have to buy it, papa.'

'There you go,' said Lord Findon—'letting me in!'

'Well, I'm off to bed.' Smiling, she gave her hand to each, knowing that she had gained her point, or would gain it. Arthur Welby, turning, watched her move away, say 'Good-night' to Lady Findon, and disappear through a distant door. Then for him, though the room was still full of people, it was vacant. He slipped away without any more 'Good-byes.'



CHAPTER V

It was Christmas Eve, and the dark had fallen. The train from Euston had just drawn up in Windermere Station, and John Fenwick, carrying his bag, was making his way among the vehicles outside the station, inquiring whether any one was going in the direction of Great Langdale, who could give him a lift. He presently found a farmer's cart bound for a village on the road, and made a bargain with the lad driving it to carry him to his destination.

They set off in bitter weather. The driver was a farmer's son who had come to the station to fetch his small brother. Fenwick and he took the little school-boy between them, to protect him as best they could from the wind and sleet. They piled some empty sacks, from the back of the cart, on their knees and shoulders; and the old grey horse set forward cautiously, feeling its way down the many hills of the Ambleside road.

The night was not yet wholly in possession. The limestone road shone dimly white, the forms of the leafless trees passed them in a windy procession, and afar on the horizon, beyond the dark gulf of the lake, there was visible at intervals a persistent dimness, something less black than the sky above and the veiled earth below, which Fenwick knew must be the snowy tops of the mountains. But it was a twilight more mournful than a total darkness; the damp air was nipping cold, and every few minutes gusts of sleet drove in their faces.

The two brothers talked to each other sometimes, in a broad Westmoreland speech. To Fenwick the dialect of his childhood was already strange and disagreeable. So, too, was the wild roughness of the Northern night, the length of the road, the sense of increasing distance from all that most held his mind. He longed, indeed, to see Phoebe and the child, but it was as though he had wilfully set up some barrier between himself and them, which spoiled his natural pleasure. Moreover, he was afraid of Phoebe, of her quick jealous love, and of certain passionate possibilities in her character that he had long ago discerned. If she discovered that he had made a mystery of his marriage—that he had passed in London as unmarried? It was an ugly and uncomfortable 'if.' Did he shrink from the possible blow to her—or the possible trouble to himself? Well, she must not find it out! It had been a wretched sort of accident, and before it could do any harm it should be amended.

Suddenly, a sound of angry water. They were close on the lake, and waves driven by the wind were plashing on the shore. Across the lake, a light in a house-window shone through the storm, the only reminder of human life amid a dark wilderness of mountains. Wild sounds crashed through the trees; and accompanying the tumult of water came the rattle of a bitter rain lashing the road, the cart, and their bent shoulders.

'There'll not be a dry stitch on us soon,' said Fenwick, presently, to the young man beside him.

'Aye, it's dampish,' said his companion, cheerfully.

The caution of the adjective set Fenwick grinning. The North found and gripped him; these are not the ways of the South.

And in a moment the sense of contrast, thus provoked, had carried him far—out of the Westmoreland night, back to London, and his shabby studio in Bernard Street. There, throned on a low platform, sat Madame de Pastourelles; and to her right, himself, sitting crouched before his easel, working with all his eyes and all his mind. The memory of her was, as it were, physically stamped upon his sight, his hands; such an intensity of study had he given to every detail of her face and form. Did he like her? He didn't know. There were a number of curious resentments in his mind with regard to her. Several times in the course of their acquaintance she had cheapened or humiliated him in his own eyes; and the sensation had been of a sharpness as yet unknown to him.

Of course, there was in it, one way or another, an aristocratic insolence! There must be: to move so delicately and immaculately through life, with such superfine perceptions, must mean that you were brought up to scorn the common way, and those who walk in it. 'The poor in a lump are bad'—coarse and ill-mannered at any rate—that must be the real meaning of her soft dignity, so friendly yet so remote, her impossibly ethereal standards, her light words that so often abashed a man for no reasonable cause.

She had been sitting to him, off and on, for about six weeks. Originally she had meant him to make a three-hour sketch of her. He triumphed in the remembrance that she and Lord Findon had found the sketch so remarkable that, when he had timidly proposed a portrait in oils, Lord Findon himself had persuaded her to sit. Since that moment his work on the portrait, immediately begun, had absorbed him to such a degree that the 'Genius Loci,' still unfinished, had been put aside, and must have its last touches when he returned to town.

But in the middle of the sittings, Madame de Pastourelles being away, and he in a mood to destroy all that he had done, he had suddenly spent a stray earning on a railway ticket to Paris.

There—excitement!—illumination!—and a whole fresh growth of ambition! Some of the mid-century portraits in the Luxembourg, and in a loan exhibition then open in the Rue Royale, excited him so that he lost sleep and appetite. The work of Bastien-Lepage was also to be seen; and the air rang with the cries of Impressionism. But the beautiful surface of the older men held him. How to combine the breadth of the new with the keeping, the sheer pleasure of the old! He rushed home—aflame!—and fell to work again.

And now he found himself a little more able to cope with his sitter. He was in possession, at any rate, of fresh topics—need not feel himself so tongue-tied in the presence of this cosmopolitan culture of hers, which she did her feminine best to disguise—which nevertheless made the atmosphere of her personality. She had lived some six years in Paris, it appeared; and had known most of the chief artists and men of letters. Fenwick writhed under his ignorance of the French language; it was a disadvantage not to be made up.

However, he talked much, and sometimes arrogantly; he gave his views, compared one man with another; if he felt any diffidence, he showed little. And indeed she led him on. Upon his art he had a right to speak, and the keen intellectual interest she betrayed in his impressions—the three days impressions of a painter—stirred and flattered him.

But he made a great many rather ludicrous mistakes, inevitable to one who had just taken a first canter through the vast field of French art; mistakes in names and dates, in the order of men and generations. And when he made a blunder he was apt to stick to it absurdly, or excuse it elaborately. She soon gave up correcting him, even in the gentle, hesitating way she at first made use of. She said nothing; but there was sometimes mischief, perhaps mockery, in her eyes. Fenwick knew it; and would either make fresh plunges, or paint on in a sulky silence.

How on earth had she guessed the authorship of those articles in the Mirror? He supposed he must have talked the same kind of stuff to her. At any rate, she had made him feel in some intangible way that it seemed to her a dishonourable thing to be writing anonymous attacks upon a body from whom you were asking, or intending to ask, exhibition space for your pictures and the chance of selling your work. His authorship was never avowed between them. Nevertheless this criticism annoyed and pricked him. He said to himself that it was just like a woman—who always took the personal view. But he had not yet begun on his last two articles, which were overdue.

On one occasion, encouraged perhaps by some kindness of expression on her part, he had ventured an indirect question or two, meant to procure him some information about her past history and present way of life. She had rebuffed him at once; and he had said to himself fiercely that it was of course because he was a man of the people and she one of 'the upper ten.' He might paint her; but he must not presume to know her!

On the other hand, his mind was still warm with memories of her encouragement, her praise. Sometimes in their talks he would put the portrait aside, and fall to sketching for her—either to illustrate his memories of pictures, or things noticed in French life and landscapes. And as the charcoal worked; as he forgot himself in hurried speech, and those remarks fell from him which are the natural outcome of a painter's experience, vivacious also and touched with literature; then her brown eyes would lighten and soften, and for once his mind would feel exultant that it moved with hers on equal terms—nay, that he was teacher and she taught. Whenever there emerged in him the signs of that demonic something that makes greatness she would be receptive, eager, humble even. But again his commoner, coarser side, his mere lack of breeding, would reappear; and she would fall back on her cold or gentle defensiveness. Thus protected by what his wrath called 'airs,' she was a mystery to him, yet a mystery that tamed and curbed him. He had never dreamt that such women existed. His own views of women were those of the shopkeeping middle class, practical, selfish, or sensual. But he had been a reader of books; and through Madame de Pastourelles certain sublimities or delicacies of poetry began to seem to him either less fantastic or more real.

All the same:—he was not sure that he liked her, and while one hour he was all restlessness to resume his task, the next it was a relief to be temporarily quit of it. As for Lord Findon, except for a certain teasing vagueness on the business side of things, he had shown himself a good friend. Several times since the first variegated evening had Fenwick dined with them, mostly en famille. Lady Findon, indeed, had been away, nursing an invalid father; Madame de Pastourelles filled her place. The old fellow would talk freely—politics, connoisseurship, art. Fenwick too was allowed his head, and said his say; though always surrounded and sometimes chafing under that discipline of good society which is its only or its best justification. It flattered his vanity enormously, however, to be thus within touch of the inner circle in politics and art; for the Findons had relations and friends in all the foremost groups of both; and incidentally Fenwick, who had the grudges and some of the dreams of the democrat, was beginning to have a glimpse of the hidden springs and powers of English society—to his no small bewilderment often!

Great luck—he admitted—all this—for a nameless artist of the people, only six months in London. He owed it to Cuningham, and believed himself grateful. Cuningham was often at the Findons, made a point, indeed, of going. Was it to maintain his place with them, and to keep Fenwick under observation? Fenwick triumphantly believed that Lord Findon greatly preferred his work—and even, by now, his conversation—to Cuningham's. But he was still envious of Cuningham's smooth tact, and agreeable, serviceable ways.

As to Welby and his place in the Findon circle, that was another matter altogether. He came and went as he pleased, on brotherly terms with the son and the younger daughters, clearly an object of great affection to Lord Findon, and often made use of by her ladyship. What was the degree of friendship between him and Madame de Pastourelles?—that had been already the subject of many meditations on Fenwick's part.

The cart deposited the school-boy in Brathay and started again for Langdale.

'Yo couldna get at Langdale for t' snaw lasst week,' said the young farmer, as they turned a corner into the Skelwith Valley. 'T' roads were fair choked wi't.'

'It's been an early winter,' said Fenwick.

'Aye, and t' Langdales get t' brunt o't. It's wild livin there, soomtimes, i' winter.'

They began to climb the first steep hill of the old road to Langdale. The snow lay piled on either side of the road, the rain beat down, and the trees clashed and moaned overhead. Not a house, not a light, upon their path—only swirling darkness, opening now and then on that high glimmer of the snow. Fresh from London streets, where winter, even if it attack in force, is so soon tamed and conquered, Fenwick was for the first time conscious of the harsher, wilder aspects of his native land. Poor Phoebe! Had she been a bit lonesome in the snow and rain?

The steep lane to the cottage was still deep in snow. The cart could not attempt it. Fenwick made his way up, fighting the eddying sleet. As he let fall the latch of the outer gate, the cottage door opened, and Phoebe, with the child in her arms, stood on the threshold.

'John!'

'Yes! God bless my soul, what a night!' He reached the door, put down his umbrella with difficulty, and dragged his bag into the passage. Then, in a moment, his coat was off and he had thrown his arm round her and the child. It seemed to him that she was curiously quiet and restrained. But she kissed him in return, drew him further within the little passage, and shut the outer door, shivering.

'The kitchen's warm,' she said, at last.

She led him in, and he found the low-ceiled room bright with fire and lamp, the table spread, and his chair beside the blaze. Kneeling down, she tried to unlace his wet boots.

'No, no!' he said, holding her away—'I'll do that, Phoebe. What's wrong with you?—you look so—so queer!'

She straightened herself, and with a laugh put back her fair hair. Her face was very pale—a greyish pallor—and her wonderful eyes stared from it in an odd, strained way.

'Oh, I'm all right,' she said; and she turned away from him to the fire, opening the oven-door to see whether the meat-pie was done.

'How have you kept in this weather?' he said, watching her. 'I'd no notion you'd had it so bad.'

'Oh, I don't know. I suppose I've had a chill or something. It's been rather weariful.'

'You didn't tell me anything about your chill.'

'Didn't I? It seems hardly worth while telling such things, from such a distance. Will you have supper at once?'

He drew up to the table, and she fed him and hovered round him, asking the while about his work, in a rather perfunctory way, about his rooms and the price of them, inquiring after the state of his clothes. But her tone and manner were unlike herself, and there was in his mind a protesting consciousness that she had not welcomed him as a young wife should after a long separation. Her manner too was extraordinarily nervous; her hand shook as she touched a plate; her movements were full of starts, and checks, as though, often, she intended a thing and then forgot it.

They avoided talking about money, and he did not mention the name of Madame de Pastourelles; though of course his letters had reported the external history of the portrait. But Phoebe presently inquired after it.

'Have you nearly done painting that lady, John?—I don't know how to say her name.'

As she spoke, she lifted a bit of bread-and-butter to her mouth and put it down untasted. In the same way she had tried to drink some tea, and had not apparently succeeded. Fenwick rose and went over to her.

'Look here, Phoebe,' he said, putting his hand on her beautiful hair and turning her face to him—'what's the matter?'

Her eyelids closed, and a quiver went through the face.

'I don't know. I—I had a fright a few days ago—at night—and I suppose I haven't got over it.'

'A fright?'

'Yes. There was a tramp one night came to the door. I half-opened it—and his face was so horrible I tried to shut it again at once. And he struggled with me, but I was strongest. Then he tried to get in at the window, but luckily I had fastened the iron bar across the shutter—and the back door. But it all held, mercifully. He couldn't get in. Then he abused me through the door, and said he would have killed me and the child, if he could have got in—and some day he would come again.' She shuddered.

Fenwick had turned pale. With his painter's imagination he saw the thing—the bestial man outside, the winter night, the slender form within pressing against the door and the bolt—

'Look here,' he said, abruptly. 'We can't have this. Somebody must sleep here. Did you tell the police?'

'Yes, I wrote—to Ambleside. They sent a man over to see me. But they couldn't catch him. He's probably left the country. I got a bell'—she opened her eyes, and pointed to it. 'If I rang it, they might hear it down at Brow Farm. They might—if the wind was that way.'

There was silence a moment. Then Fenwick stooped and kissed her.

'Poor old girl!' he said, softly. She made but slight response. He returned to his place, repeating with a frowning energy—'You must have some one to sleep here.'

'Daisy would come—if I'd pay her.'

Daisy was their little servant of the summer, the daughter of a quarryman near by.

'Well, pay her!'

She drew herself up sharply. 'I haven't got the money—and you always say, when you write, you haven't any either.'

'I'll find some for that. I can't have you scared like this.'

But, though his tone was vehement, it was not particularly affectionate. He was horribly discomposed indeed, could not get the terrible image out of his mind. But as he went on with his supper, the shock of it mingled with a good many critical or reproachful thoughts. Why had she persisted in staying on in Langdale, instead of going to her father? All that foolish dislike of her stepmother! It had been open to her to stay in her father's farm, with plenty of company. If she wouldn't, was he to blame if the cottage was lonesome?

But as though she divined this secret debate she presently said:

'I went to Keswick last week.'

He looked up, startled. 'Well?'

'Father's ill—he's got a bad chest, and the doctor says he may be going into a consumption.'

'Doctors'll say anything!' cried Fenwick, wrathfully. 'If ever there was a strong man, it's your father. Don't you believe any croaking of that sort, Phoebe.'

She shook her head.

'He looks so changed,' she said; and began drawing with her finger on the tablecloth. He saw that her lips were trembling. A strong impulse worked in him, bidding him go to her again, kiss away her tears, and say—'Hang everything! Come with me to London, and let's sink or swim together.'

Instead of which some perverse cross-current hurried him into the words:

'He'd be all right if you'd go and nurse him, Phoebe.'

'No, not at all. They didn't want me—and Mrs. Gibson, poor creature, was real glad when I said I was going. She was jealous of me all the time.'

'I expect you imagined that.'

Phoebe's face flushed angrily.

'I didn't!' she said, shortly. 'Everybody in the house knew it.'

The meal went on rather silently. Fenwick's conscience said to him, 'Take her back with you!—whatever happens, take her to London—she's moping her life out here.' And an inner voice clamoured in reply—'Take her to those rooms?—in the very middle of the struggle with those two pictures?—go through all the agitation and discomfort of explanations with Lord Findon and Madame de Pastourelles?—run the risk of estranging them, and of distracting your own mind from your work at this critical moment?—the further risk, moreover, of Phoebe's jealousy?'

For in her present nervous and fidgety state she would very likely be jealous of his sitter, and of the way in which Madame de Pastourelles' portrait possessed his mind. No, it really couldn't be done!—it really couldn't! He must finish the two pictures—persuade Lord Findon to buy the 'Genius Loci,' and make the portrait such a success that he must needs buy that too. Then let discovery come on; it should find him steeled.

Meanwhile, Phoebe must have a servant, and not any mere slip of a girl, but some one who would be a companion and comfort. He began to talk of it, eagerly, only to find that Phoebe took but a languid interest in the idea.

She could think of no one—wanted no one, but Daisy. Again his secret ill-humour waxed and justified itself. It was unreasonable and selfish that she should not be able to think for herself and the child better; after all, he was slaving for her as much as for himself.

Meanwhile, Carrie sat very silent beside her father, observing him, and every now and then applying her pink lips to some morsel he held out to her on his fork. He had kissed her, and tossed her, and she was now sitting in his pocket. But after these eight months the child of four was shy and timid with this unfamiliar father. He on his side saw that she was prettier than before; his eye delighted in some of the rarer and lovelier lines of her little face; and he felt a fatherly pride. He must make some fresh studies of her; the child in the 'Genius Loci' might be improved.

After supper, Phoebe seemed to him so pale and tottering that he made her rest beside the fire, while he himself cleared the supper-things away. She lay back in her chair, laughing at his awkwardness, or starting up when china clashed.

Meanwhile, as in their farewell talk beside the ghyll eight months before, her mood gradually and insensibly changed. Whatever unloving thoughts or resentments had held her in the first hour of their meeting, however strong had been the wish to show him that she had been lonely and suffering, she could not resist what to her was the magic of his presence. As he moved about in the low, firelit room, and she watched him, her whole nature melted; and he knew it.

Presently she took the child upstairs. He waited for her, hanging over the fire—listening to the storm outside—and thinking, thinking—

When she reappeared, and he, looking round, saw her standing in the doorway, so tall and slender, her pale face and hair coloured by the glow of the fire, passion and youth spoke in him once more.

He sprang up and caught her in his arms. Presently, sitting in the old armchair beside the blaze, he had gathered her on his knee, and she had clasped her hands round his neck, and buried her face against him. All things were forgotten, save that they were man and wife together, within this 'wind-warm space'—ringed by night, and pattering sleet, and gusts that rushed in vain upon the roof that sheltered them.

But next morning, within the little cottage—beating rain on the windows, and a cheerless storm-light in the tiny rooms—the hard facts of the situation resumed their sway. In the first place money questions had to be faced. Fenwick made the most of his expectations; but at best they were no more, and how to live till they became certainties was the problem. If Lord Findon had commissioned the portrait, or definitely said he would purchase the 'Genius Loci,' some advance might have been asked for. As it was, how could money be mentioned yet a while? Phoebe had a fine and costly piece of embroidery on hand, commissioned through an 'Art Industry' started at Windermere the summer before; but it could not be finished for some weeks, possibly months, and the money Fenwick proposed to earn during his fortnight in the North by some illustrations long overdue had been already largely forestalled. He gloomily made up his mind to appeal to an old cousin in Kendal, the widow of a grocer, said to be richly left, who had once in his boyhood given him five shillings. With much distaste he wrote the letter and walked to Elterwater in the rain to post it. Then he tried to work; but little Carrie, fractious from confinement indoors, was troublesome and disturbed him. Phoebe, too, would make remarks on his drawing which seemed to him inept. In old days he would have laughed at her for pretending to know, and turned it off with a kiss. Now what she said set him on edge. The talk he had been living amongst had spoilt him for silly criticisms. Moreover, for the first time he detected in her a slight tone of the 'schoolmarm'—didactic and self-satisfied, without knowledge. The measure Madame de Pastourelles had dealt out to him, he in some sort avenged on Phoebe.

At the same time there were much more serious causes of difference. Each had a secret from the other. Fenwick's secret was that he had foolishly passed in London as an unmarried man, and that he could not take Phoebe back with him, because of the discomforts and risks in which a too early avowal of her would involve him. He was morbidly conscious of this; brooded over it, and magnified it.

She on the other hand was tormented by a fixed idea—already in existence at the time of their first parting, but much strengthened by loneliness and fretting—that he was tired of her and not unwilling to be without her. The joy of their meeting banished it for a time, but it soon came back. She had never acquiesced in the wisdom of their separation; and to question it was to resent it more and more deeply—to feel his persistence in it a more cruel offence, month by month. Her pride prevented her from talking of it; but the soreness of her grievance invaded their whole relation. And in her moral unrest she showed faults which had been scarcely visible in their early married years—impatience, temper, suspicion, a readiness to magnify small troubles whether of health or circumstance.

During her months alone she had been reading many novels of an indifferent sort, which the carrier brought her from the lending library at Windermere. She talked excitedly of some of them, had 'cried her eyes out' over this or that. Fenwick picked up one or two, and threw them away for 'trash.' He scornfully thought that they had done her harm, made her more nervous and difficult. But at night, when he had done his work, he never took any trouble to read to her, or to talk to her about other than household things. He smoked or drew in silence; and she sat over her embroidery, lost in morbid reverie.

One morning he discovered amongst her books a paper-covered 'Life of Romney'—a short compilation issued by a local bookseller.

'Why, whatever did you get this for, Phoebe?' he said, holding it up.

She looked up from her mending, and coloured. 'I wanted to read it.'

'But why?'

'Well'—she hesitated—'I thought it was like you.'

'Like me?—you little goose!'

'I don't know,' she said, doggedly, looking hard at her work—'there was the hundred pounds that he got to go to London with—and then, marrying a wife in Kendal—and'—she looked up with a half-defiant smile—'and leaving her behind!'

'Oh! so you think that's like me?' he said, seating himself again at his drawing.

'It's rather like.'

'You suppose you're going to be left here for thirty years?' He laughed as he spoke.

She laughed too, but not gaily—with a kind of defiance.

'Well, it wouldn't be quite as easy now, would it?—with trains, and all that. There were only coaches then, I suppose. Now, London's so near.'

'I wish you'd always think so!' he cried. 'Why, of course it's near. I'm only seven hours away. What's that, in these days? And in three months' time, things will be all right and square again.'

'I dare say,' she said, sighing.

'Why can't you wait cheerfully?' he asked, rather exasperated—'instead of being so down.'

'Because'—she broke out—'I don't see the reason of it—there! No, I don't!—However!'—she pressed back her hair from her eyes and drew herself together. 'You've never shown me your studies of that—that lady—John; you said you would.'

Relieved at the change of subject, he took a sketch-book out of his pocket and gave it to her. It contained a number of 'notes' for his portrait of Madame de Pastourelles—sketches of various poses, aspects of the head and face, arrangements of the hands, and so forth. Phoebe pondered it in silence.

'She's pretty—I think,' she said, at last, doubtfully.

'I'm not sure that she is,' said Fenwick. 'She's very pale.'

'That doesn't matter. The shape of her face is awfully pretty—and her eyes. Is her hair like mine?'

'No, not nearly so good.'

'Ah, if I could only do it as prettily as she does!' said Phoebe, faintly smiling. 'I suppose, John, she's very smart and fashionable?'

'Well, she's Lord Findon's daughter—that tells you. They're pretty well at the top.'

Phoebe asked various other questions, then fell silent, still pondering the sketches. After a while she put down her work and came to sit on a stool beside Fenwick, sometimes laying her golden head against his knee, or stretching out her hand to touch his. He responded affectionately enough; but as the winter twilight deepened in the little room, Phoebe's eyes, fixed upon the fire, resumed their melancholy discontent. She was less necessary to him even than before; she knew by a thousand small signs that the forces which possessed his mind—perhaps his heart!—were not now much concerned with her.

She tried to control, to school herself. But the flame within was not to be quenched—was, indeed, perpetually finding fresh fuel. How quietly he had taken the story of the tramp's attack upon her!—which still, whenever she thought of it, thrilled her own veins with horror. No doubt he had been over to Ambleside to speak to the police; and he had arranged that the little servant, Daisy, should come to her when he left. But if he had merely caught her to him with one shuddering cry of love and rage—that would have been worth all his precautions!—would have effaced the nightmare, and filled her heart.

As to his intellectual life, she was now much more conscious of her exclusion from it than she ever had been in their old life together.

For it was a consciousness quickened by jealousy. Little as Fenwick talked about Madame de Pastourelles, Phoebe understood perfectly that she was a woman of high education and refinement, and that her stored and subtle mind was at once an attraction and a cause of humiliation to John. And through his rare stories of the Findon household and the Findon dinner-parties, the wife dimly perceived a formidable world, bristling with strange acquirements and accomplishments, in which he, perhaps, was beginning to find a place, thanks to his art; while she, his obscure and ignorant wife, must resign herself to being for ever shut out from it—to knowing it from his report only. How could she ever hold her own with such people? He would talk with them, paint them, dine with them, while she sat at home—Carrie's nurse, and the domestic drudge.

And yet she was of that type which represents perhaps the most ambitious element in the lower middle class. It had been a great matter that she, a small farmer's daughter, should pass her examinations and rise to be a teacher in Miss Mason's school. She had had her triumphs and conceits; had been accustomed to think herself clever and successful, to hold her head high amongst her schoolmates. Whereas now, if she tried to talk of art or books, she was hotly aware that everything she said was, in John's eyes, pretentious or absurd. He was comparing her with others all the time, with men and women—women especially—in whose presence he felt himself as diffident as she did in his. He was thinking of ladies in velvet dresses and diamonds, who could talk wittily of pictures and theatres and books, who could amuse him and distract him. And meanwhile she went about in her old stuff dress, her cotton apron and rolled-up sleeves, cooking and washing and cleaning—for her child and for him. She felt through every nerve that he was constantly aware of details of dress or menage that jarred upon him; she suspected miserably that all her little personal ways and habits seemed to him ugly and common; and the suspicion showed itself in pride or brusquerie.

Meanwhile, if she had been restful, if he could only have forgotten his cares in her mere youth and prettiness, Fenwick would have been easily master of his discontents. For he was naturally of a warm, sensuous temper. Had the woman understood her own arts, she could have held him.

But she was not restful, she was exacting and self-conscious; and, moreover, a certain new growth of Puritanism in her repelled him. While he had been passing under the transforming influences of an all-questioning thought and culture, she had been turning to Evangelical religion for consolation. There was a new minister in a Baptist chapel a mile or two away, of whom she talked, whose services she attended. The very mention of him presently became a boredom to Fenwick. The new influence had no effect upon her jealousies and discontents; but it re-enforced a natural asceticism, and weakened whatever power she possessed of playing on a husband's passion. Meanwhile, Fenwick was partly aware of her state of mind, and far from happy himself. His conscience pricked him; but such prickings are small help to love. Often he found himself guiltily brooding over Lord Findon's tirades against the early marriages of artists. There was a horrid truth in them. No doubt an artist should wait till his circumstances were worthy of his gifts; and then marry a woman who could understand and help him on.

Nor was even the child a binding influence. Fenwick in this visit became for the first time a fond father. A certain magic in the little Carrie flattered his vanity and excited his hopes. He drew her many times, and prophesied confidently that she would be a beauty. But, in his secret opinion, she was spoilt and mismanaged; and he talked a good deal to Phoebe about her bringing-up, theorising and haranguing in his usual way. Phoebe listened generally with impatience, resenting interference with her special domain. And often, when she saw the father and child together, a fresh and ugly misery would raise its head. Would he in time set even Carrie against her—teach the child to look down upon its mother?

One day he returned from Ambleside, pale and excited—bringing a Manchester paper.

'Phoebe!' he called, from the gate.

Startled by something in his voice, Phoebe ran out to him.

'Phoebe, an awful thing's happened! Old Morrison's—dead! Look here!'

And he showed her a paragraph headed 'Defalcations and suicide.' It described how Mr. James Morrison, the chief cashier of the Bartonbury Bank, had committed suicide immediately after the discovery by the bank authorities of large falsifications in the bank accounts. Mr. Morrison had shot himself, leaving a statement acknowledging a long course of fraudulent dealings with the funds entrusted to him, and pleading with his employers for his wife and daughter. 'Great sympathy,' said the Guardian reporter, 'is felt in Bartonbury with Mrs. Morrison, whose character has always been highly respected. But, indeed, the whole family occupied a high position, and the shock to the locality has been great.' On which followed particulars of the frauds and a long report of the inquest.

Phoebe was struck with horror. She lingered over the paper, commenting, exclaiming; while Fenwick sat staring into the fire, his hands on his knees.

Presently she came to him and said in a low voice:

'And what about the money, John—the loan?'

'I am not obliged to return it in money,' he said, sharply.

'Well, the pictures?'

'That'll be all right. I must think about it. There'll be no hurry.'

'Did Mrs. Morrison know—about the loan?'

'I dare say. I never heard.'

'I suppose she and the daughter'll have nothing?'

'That doesn't follow at all. Very likely he'd settled something on them, which can't be touched. A man like that generally does.'

'Poor things!' she said, shuddering. 'But, John—you'll pay it back to Mrs. Morrison?'

'Of course I shall,' he said, impatiently—'in due time. But please remember, Phoebe, that's my affair. Don't you talk of it—to any one.'

He looked up to emphasise his words.

Phoebe flushed.

'I wasn't going to talk of it to any one,' she said, proudly, as she moved away.

Presently he took up his hat again and went out, that he might be alone with his thoughts. The rain had vanished; and a frosty sunshine sparkled on the fells, on the red bracken and the foaming becks. He took the mountain-path which led past the ghyll, up to the ridge which separates Langdale from Grasmere and Easedale. Morrison's finely wrinkled face, with its blue, complacent eyes and thin nose, hovered before him—now as he remembered it in life, and now as he imagined it in death. Hard fate! There had been an adventurous, poetic element in Morrison—something beyond the ken of the ordinary Philistine—and it had come to this. Fenwick remembered him among the drawings he had collected. Real taste—real sense of beauty—combined no doubt with the bargaining instinct and a natural love of chicanery. Moreover, Fenwick believed that, so far as a grasping temper would allow, there had been a genuine wish to help undiscovered talent. He thought of the hand which had given him the check, and had a vision of it holding the revolver—of the ghastly, solitary end. And no one had guessed—unless, indeed, it were his wife? Perhaps that look of hers—as of a creature hunted by secret fears—was now explained.

How common such things are!—and probably, so ran his thoughts, will always be. We are all acting. Each man or woman carries this potentiality of a double life—it is only a question of less or more.

Suddenly he coloured, as he saw himself thus writ double—first as he appeared to Madame de Pastourelles, and then as he appeared to Phoebe. Masquerading was easy, it seemed; and conscience made little fuss! Instantly, however, the inner man rebelled against the implied comparison of himself with Morrison. An accidental concealment, acquiesced in temporarily, for business reasons—what had that in common with villainy like Morrison's? An awkward affair, no doubt; and he had been a fool to slip into it. But in a few weeks he would put it right—come what would.

As to the debt—he tried to fight against a feeling of deliverance—but clearly he need be in no hurry to pay it. He had been living in dread of Morrison's appearing in Bernard Street to claim his bond—revealing Phoebe's existence perhaps to ears unprepared—and laying greedy hands upon the 'Genius Loci.' It would have been hard to keep him off it—unless Lord Findon had promptly come forward—and it would have been odious to yield it to him. 'Now I shall take my time.' Of course, ultimately, he would repay the money to Mrs. Morrison and Bella. But better, even in their interests, to wait a while, till there could be no question of any other claim to it.

So from horror he passed to a personal relief, of which he was rather ashamed, and then again to a real uneasy pity for the wife and for the vulgar daughter who had so bitterly resented his handling of her charms. He remembered the note in which she had acknowledged the final delivery of her portrait. In obedience to Morrison's suggestion, he had kept it by him a few days; and then, either unable or proudly unwilling to alter it, he had returned it to its owner. Whereupon a furious note from Miss Bella, which—knowing that her father took no account of her tempers—Fenwick had torn up with a laugh. It was clear that she had heard of her father's invitation to him to 'beautify' it, and when the picture reappeared unaltered she took it as a direct and personal insult—a sign that he disliked her and meant to humiliate her. It was an odd variety of the spretae injuria formae. Fenwick had never been in the least penitent for his behaviour. The picture was true, clever—and the best he could do. It was no painter's business to endow Miss Bella with beauty, if she did not possess it. As a piece of paint, the picture had beauty—if she had only eyes to find it out.

Poor girl!—what husband now would venture on such a termagant wife?—penniless too, and disgraced! He would like to help her, and her mother—for Morrison's sake. Stirred by a fleeting impulse, he began to scheme how he might become their benefactor, as Morrison had been his.

Then, as he raised his eyes from the path—with a rush of delight he noticed the flood of afternoon sunlight pouring on the steep fell-side, the sharp black shadows thrown by wall and tree, the brilliance of the snow along the topmost ridge. He raced along, casting the Morrisons out of his thoughts, forgetting everything but the joy of atmosphere and light—the pleasure of his physical strength. Near one of the highest crags he came upon a shepherd-boy and his dog collecting some sheep. The collie ran hither and thither with the marvellous shrewdness of his breed, circling, heading, driving; the stampede of the sheep, as they fled before him, could be heard along the fell. The sun played upon the flock, turning its dirty grey to white, caught the little figure of the shepherd-boy, as he stood shouting and waving, or glittered on the foaming stream beside him. Purple shadows bathed the fell beyond—and on its bosom the rustic scene emerged—a winter idyl.

Fenwick sat down upon a rock, ransacked his pockets for sketch-book and paints, and began to sketch. When he had made his 'note,' he sat lost a while in the pleasure of his own growing skill and sharpening perceptions, and dreaming of future 'subjects.' A series of 'Westmoreland months,' illustrating the seasons among the fells and the life of the dalesmen, ran through his mind. Nature appeared to his exultant sense as a vast treasure-house stored for him only—a mine inexhaustible offered to his craftsman's hand. For him the sweeping hues, the intricate broideries—green or russet, red or purple—of this winter world!—for him the delicacy of the snow, the pale azure of the sky, the cloud-shadows, the white becks, the winding river in the valley floor, the purple crags, the lovely accents of light and shade, the hints of composition that wooed his eager eye. Who was it that said 'Composition is the art of preserving the accidental look'? Clever fellow!—there was the right thing said, for once! And so he slipped into a reverie, which was really one of those moments—plastic and fruitful—by which the artist makes good his kinship with 'the great of old,' his right to his own place in the unending chain.