ch, all movement, on the part of
the woman, for jealousy of whom the wife had so ignorantly destroyed
herself and Fenwick, a thing impossible.

Eugenie's only comfort indeed, at this time, was the comfort of
religion. Her soul, sorely troubled and very stern with itself,
wandered in mystical, ascetic paths out of human ken. Every morning
she hurried through the woods to a little church beside the sea,
filled with fishing-folk. There she heard Mass, and made the spiritual
communion which sustained her.

Once, in the mediaeval siege of a Spanish fortress, so a Spanish
chronicler tells us, all the defenders were slaughtered but one man;
and he lay dying on the ground, across the gate. There was neither
priest nor wafer; but the dying man raised a little of the soil
between the stones to his lips, and so, says the chronicler,
'communicated in the earth itself,' before he passed to the Eternal
Presence. Eugenie would have done the same with a like ardour and
simplicity; her thought differing much, perhaps, in its perceived and
logical elements, from that of the dying Spaniard, but none the less
profoundly akin. The act was to her the symbol and instrument of an
Inflowing Power; the details of those historical beliefs with which
it was connected, mattered little. And as she thus leant upon the old,
while conscious of the new, she never in truth felt herself alone.
It seemed to her, often, that she clasped hands with a vast invisible
multitude, in a twilight soon to be dawn.

CHAPTER XII

A fortnight later Dick Watson died. Fenwick saw him several times
before the end, and was present at his last moments. The funeral
was managed by Cuningham; so were the obituary notices; and Fenwick
attended the funeral and read the notices, with that curious mixture
of sore grief and jealous irritation into which our human nature is so
often betrayed at similar moments.

Then he found himself absorbed by the later rehearsals of _The Queen's
Necklace_; by the completion of his pictures for the May exhibition;
and by the perpetual and ignominious hunt for money. As to this last,
it seemed to him that each day was a battle in which he was for ever
worsted. He was still trying in vain to sell his house at Chelsea, the
house planned at the height of his brief prosperity, built and finely
furnished on borrowed money, and now apparently unsaleable, because
of certain peculiarities in it, which suited its contriver, and no one
else. A