-that the only reparation he, Fenwick, could make to the
friends he had so long and cruelly deceived, was to allow them a free
hand in a fresh attempt to discover his wife, and so to clear Madame
de Pastourelles from the ridiculous suspicions that Mrs. Fenwick
had been led so disastrously to entertain. 'Most shamefully and
indefensibly my daughter has been made to feel herself an accomplice
in Mrs. Fenwick's disappearance,' wrote Lord Findon; 'the only amends
you can ever make for your conduct will lie in new and vigorous
efforts, even at this late hour, to find and to undeceive your wife.'

Hence, during November and December, constant meetings and
consultations in the well-known offices of Lord Findon's solicitors.
At these meetings both Madame de Pastourelles and her father had
been often present, and she had followed the debates with a quick and
strained intelligence, which often betrayed to Fenwick the suffering
behind. He painfully remembered with what gentleness and chivalry
Eugenie had always treated him personally on these occasions, with
what anxious generosity she had tried to curb her father.

But there had been no private conversation between them. Not only did
they shrink from it; Lord Findon could not have borne it. The storm of
family and personal pride which the disclosure of Fenwick's story had
aroused in the old man had been of a violence impossible to resist.
That Fenwick's obscure and crazy wife should have dared to entertain
_jealousy_ of a being so far above his ken and hers, as Eugenie then
was--that she should have made a ridiculous tragedy out of it--and
that Fenwick should have conduced to the absurd and insulting
imbroglio by his ill-bred and vulgar concealment:--these things
were so irritating to Lord Findon that they first stimulated a rapid
recovery from his illness at Versailles, and then led him to frantic
efforts on Phoebe's behalf, which were in fact nothing but the
expression of his own passionate pride and indignation--resting, no
doubt ultimately, on those weeks at Versailles when even he, with all
the other bystanders, had supposed that Eugenie would marry this man.
His mood, indeed, had been a curious combination of wounded affection
with a class arrogance stiffened by advancing age and long indulgence.
When, in those days, the old man entered the room where Fenwick was,
he bore his grey head and sparkling eyes with the air of a teased
lion.

Fenwick, a man of violent temper, w