ect of Phoebe's action on that proud, pure
nature and sensitive conscience; and he knew what she and her
father must feel towards the deception which had led her into such a
position, and made such a tragedy possible. He foresaw her recoil, her
bitter condemnation, the final ruin of the relation between himself
and her; and yet more than these did he dread her pain, her causeless,
innocent pain. To stab the hand which had helped him, the heart which
had already suffered so much, in the very first hours of his own shock
and misery, he had shrunk from this, he had tried his best to protect
Madame de Pastourelles.

Hence the compact with his landlady, by which he had in fact bribed
her to silence, and transformed her into a devoted servant always
under his eye; hence the various means by which he had found it
possible to quiet the members of his own family and of Phoebe's--needy
folk, most of them, cannily unwilling to make an enemy of a man who
was likely, so they understood, to be rich, and who already showed a
helpful disposition. When once he had convinced himself that he had
no clue, and that Phoebe had disappeared, it had not been difficult
indeed to keep his secret, and to hide the traces of his own
wrong-doing, his own share in the catastrophe. Between Phoebe's world
and the world in which he was now to live, there were few or no links.
Bella Morrison might have supplied one. But she and her mother
had moved to Guernsey, and a year after Phoebe's flight Fenwick
ascertained that old Mrs. Morrison was dead, and that Bella had gone
to South America as companion to a lady.

So in an incredibly short time the crisis was over. The last phase was
connected with the cousin--Freddy Tolson--who had visited Phoebe the
night before her journey to London, and was now in New South Wales.

A letter from Fenwick to this young man, containing a number of
questions as to his conversation with Phoebe, and written immediately
after Phoebe's flight, obtained an answer after some three or four
months, but Tolson's reply was wholly unprofitable. He merely avowed
that he had discovered nothing at all of Phoebe's intention, and
could throw no light whatever upon her disappearance. The letter
was laboriously written by a man of imperfect education, and barely
covered three loosely written sides of ordinary note-paper. It arrived
when Fenwick's own researches were already at a standstill, and seemed
to leave nothing more to hope for. The