of time;
and this longer account contained the remark that she had asked him
questions about other colonies than Australia, to which he was himself
bound. He thought Canada had been mentioned--the length of the passage
there, and its cost. He had not paid much attention to it at the time.
It had seemed to him that she was glad, poor thing, of some one
to have a 'crack' with--'for I guess she'd been pretty lonesome up
there.' But she might have had something in her head--he couldn't say.
All he could declare was that if she were in Canada, or any other of
the colonies, he had had no hand in it, and knew no more than a 'born
baby' where she might be hidden.

So now, on this vague hint, a number of fresh inquiries were to be
set on foot. Fenwick hoped nothing from them. Yet as he walked fast
through the London streets, from which the fog was lifting, his mind
wrestled with vague images of great lakes, and virgin forests, and
rolling wheat-lands--of the streets of Montreal, or the Heights of
Quebec--and amongst them, now with one background, now with another,
the slender figure of a fair-haired woman with a child beside her. And
through his thoughts, furies of distress and fear pursued him--now as
always.

'Well, this is a queer go, isn't it?' said Watson, in a
half-whispering voice. 'Nature has horrid ways of killing you. I wish
she'd chosen a more expeditious one with me.'

Fenwick sat down beside his friend, the lamp-light in the old panelled
room revealing, against his will, his perturbed and shaken expression.

'How did this come on?' he asked.

'Of itself, my dear fellow'--laughed Watson, in the same hoarse
whisper. 'My right lung has been getting rotten for a year past, and
at Marseilles it happened to break. That's my explanation, anyway, and
it does as well as the doctor's.--Well, how are you?'

Fenwick shifted uneasily, and made a vague answer.

Watson turned to look at him.

'What pictures have you on hand?'

Fenwick gave a list of the completed pictures still in his studio, and
described the arrangements made to exhibit them. He was not as ready
as usual to speak of himself; his gaze and his attention were fixed
upon his friend. But Watson probed further, into the subjects of his
recent work. Fenwick was nearing the end, he explained, of a series of
rustic 'Months' with their appropriate occupations--an idea which had
haunted his mind for years.

'As old as the hills,' said Watson, 'but none the wor