nd then, at long intervals, represented the return
upon him of the indestructible past. Often for months together it
meant little or nothing to him, but the dull weight of his secret;
twelve years had inevitably deadened feeling, and filled the mind with
fresh interests, while of late the tumult of his Academy and Press
campaign had silenced the stealing, distant voices. Yet there were
moments when all was as fresh and poignant as it had been in the first
hours, when Phoebe, with her golden head and her light, springing
step, seemed to move beside him, and he felt the drag of a small hand
in his.

He stiffened himself--like one attacked. The ghosts of dead hours came
trooping and eddying round him, like the autumn leaves that had begun
to strew the Paris streets--all the scenes of that first ghastly week
when he had hunted in desperation for his lost wife and child. His
joyous return from Chelsea, on the evening of his good-fortune--Mrs.
Gibbs's half-sulky message on the door-step that 'Mrs. Fenwick' was
in the studio--his wild rush upstairs--the empty room, the letter, the
ring:--his hurried journey North--the arrival at the Langdale cottage,
only to find on the table of the deserted parlour another letter from
Phoebe, written before she left Westmoreland, in the prevision that
he would come there in search of a clue, and urging him for both their
sakes to make no scandal, no hue and cry, to accept the inevitable,
and let her go in peace--his interview with the servant Daisy, who had
waited with the child in an hotel close to Euston, while Phoebe went
to Bernard Street, and had been sent back to the North immediately
after Phoebe's return, without the smallest indication of what
her mistress meant to do--his fruitless consultations with Anna
Mason!--the whole dismal story rose before him, as it was wont to do
periodically, filling him with the same rage, the same grief, the same
fierce and inextinguishable resentment.

Phoebe had destroyed his life. She had not only robbed him of herself
and of their child, she had forced him into an acted lie which had
poisoned his whole existence, and, first and foremost, that gracious
and beautiful friendship which was all, save his art, that she had
left him. For, in the first moments of his despair and horror, he had
remembered what it would mean to Madame de Pastourelles, did she ever
know that his mad wife had left him out of jealousy of her. He was
not slow to imagine the eff