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,
acquie