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 sh