owed her all the steps of the unhappy
business. She remembered the awkward, harassed youth, as she had first
seen him at her father's table, with his curious mixture of arrogance
and timidity; now haranguing the table, and now ready to die with
confusion over some social slip. She understood what he had told her,
in his first piteous letter, of his paralysed, tongue-tied states--of
his fear of alienating her father and herself. And she went deeper.
She confessed the hatefulness of those weakening timidities, those
servile states of soul, by which our social machine balances the
insolences and cruelties of the strong--its own breeding also; she
felt herself guilty because of them; the whole of life seemed to her
sick, because a young man, ill at ease and cowardly in a world not his
own, had told or lived a foolish lie. It was as though she had
forced it from him; she understood so well how it had come about. No,
no!--her father might judge it as he pleased. She was angry no longer.

Nor--presently--did she even resent the treachery of those weeks at
Versailles, so quick and marvellous was the play of her great gift of
sympathy, which was only another aspect of imagination. In recoil from
a dark moment of her own experience, of which she could never think
without anguish, she had offered him a friend's hand, a friend's
heart--offered them eagerly and lavishly. Had he done more than
take them, with the craving of a man, for whom already the ways are
darkening, who makes one last clutch at 'youth and bloom, and this
delightful world'? He had been reckless and cruel indeed. But in its
profound tenderness and humility and self-reproach her heart forgave
him.

Yet of that forgiveness she could make no outward sign--for her own
sake and Phoebe's. That old relation could never be again; the weeks
at Versailles had killed it. Unless, indeed, some day it were her
blessed lot to find the living Phoebe, and bring her to her husband!
Then friendship, as well as love, might perhaps lift its head once
more. And as during the months of winter, both before and since her
departure from England, the tidings reached her of Fenwick's growing
embarrassments, of his increasing coarseness and carelessness of work,
his violence of temper, the friend in her suffered profoundly. She
knew that she could still do much for him. Yet there, in the way,
stood the image of Phoebe, as Daisy Hewson described her,--pale,
weary, desperate,--making all spee