ael's protests stayed in bed, pleading that
she felt giddy whenever she stood up. Twice Archelaus came to the house
and had to be content with calling to her through the door, and each
time she replied she was not well enough to see him.

He began to fume that his hidden delight of torment, which in his
distorted mind was part of his scheme for revenge against Ishmael, was
being thwarted; and day by day as he brooded to himself, his thoughts
ever on the same theme, the end of all his anger and her fear began to
loom, as he had planned. It was chance that eventually played into his
hands, but the will and the cunning that made him ripe to catch at it
were his already.

CHAPTER II

THE PASSAGE

Phoebe lay in her big bed, her arms straight out upon the coverlet,
listless palms upwards, her eyes closed, and her dim thoughts--the
unformed blind thoughts of a resentful child--her only company. A week
earlier Ishmael had been called up to Devon to see his mother, who had
taken a turn for the worse: she had died a few hours after his arrival;
he had had to stay and see to the funeral, and was not due back till
that evening. John-James was in the fields and the maids were all in the
dairy, working hard to finish the butter for market. Phoebe did not
mind--for the first time in her life she preferred to be alone; she
found it more and more difficult to control herself in the presence of
others, to hide or account for the terror that possessed her. Only when
she thought of the little life that in another month she would have
brought into the world, that would be nestling against her, did she feel
a glow of comfort. Nothing disturbed her joy in that, which she had
perforce to pretend was the cause of her depression. As she lay now,
with the wrongs done to her and by her stirring in her slow bewildered
brain, she banished them by thoughts of that which was to be hers--that
solace so far sweeter than the little animals with which she had
hitherto filled her days. Poor Wanda, who from much petting had grown to
fawn on her almost as much as upon Ishmael, was neglected now, and did
not even stretch her woolly length beside the bed, but roamed, alone and
melancholy, in the passage, waiting for the well-known loved footstep of
her master.

Phoebe curved over in bed, and began to pretend to herself, as when a
small child she had been wont to do for the first hour in bed every
evening--planning small pleasures, triumphs over t