, no, of course she knew nothing. She had inquired
of some friends in the North, and they also knew nothing. They had
only heard that husband and wife couldn't hit it off, and that Mrs.
Fenwick had gone abroad. It was a pity--but a body might have expected
it, mightn't they?

The crude conceit and violence of her girlhood had given place, under
the pressure of a hard life, to something venomous and servile. She
never mentioned her visit to Phoebe; but her eyes seemed to mock her
visitor all the time. Fenwick cut the interview short as soon as he
could, hastily paid her a hundred pounds, though it left him overdrawn
and almost penniless, and then rushed back to his hotel to see what
might be waiting for him.

An envelope was lying on his table. It cost him a great effort to open
it.

'I have received your letter. There is nothing to say, except that I
must see you. I wish to keep what you have told me from my father, for
the present, at any rate. There would be no possibility of our talking
here. We have only one sitting-room, and my sister is there all the
time. I will be at the Bosquet d'Apollon, by 11.30.'

Only that! He stared at the delicate, almost invisible writing. The
moment he had dreaded for twelve years had arrived; and the world
still went on, and quiet notes like that could still be written.

Long before the hour fixed he was in the Bosquet d'Apollon, walking up
and down in front of the famous grotto, on whose threshold the white
Apollo, just released from the chariot of the Sun, receives the
ministrations of the Muses, while his divine horses are being fed and
stalled in the hollows of the rock to either side. No stranger fancy
than this ever engaged the architects and squandered the finances of
the Builder-King. Reared in solid masonry on bare sandy ground now
entirely disguised, the artificial rock that holds the grotto towers
to a great height, crowned by ancient trees, weathered by wind and
rain, overgrown by leaf and grass, and laved at its base by clear
water. All round, the trees stand close--the lawns spread their quiet
slopes. On this sparkling autumn morning, a glory of russet, amber,
and red, begirt the white figures and the gleaming grotto. The
Immortals, the champing horses, locked behind their _grilles_ lest
the tourist should insult them--all the queer crumbling romance of
the statuary, all the natural beauty of leaf and water, of the white
clouds overhead and their reflexions below--c