roidery 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 ca