ad
stamped her will, so easily, so fatally, flowing on the while, year by
year, towards Death and the End!--and these voices of 'Too late!' in
her ears!

But still the impulse of return grew--mysteriously it
seemed--independently. And other facts and experiences came strangely
to its aid. In the language of Evangelicalism which had been natural
to her youth, Phoebe felt now, as she looked back, that she had been
wonderfully 'led.' It was this sense, indeed, which had softened
the humiliation and determined the actual steps of her homeward
pilgrimage; she seemed to have been yielding to an actual external
force in what she had done.

For it had not been easy, this second uprooting. Carrie, especially,
had had her own reasons for making it difficult. And Phoebe had never
yet had the courage to tell her the truth. She had spoken vaguely of
'business' obliging them to take a journey to England--had asked the
child to trust her--and taken refuge in tears and depression from
Carrie's objections. In consequence, she had seen the first shadow
descend on Carrie's youth; she had been conscious of the first breach
between herself and her daughter.

In a sudden agony, she walked back to the window in her own room,
looking this time, not towards Elterwater and the post, but towards
Dungeon Ghyll and the wild upper valley.

Anna Mason had taken Carrie for a walk. At that moment, on Phoebe's
prayer, she was telling the child the story of her father and mother.

Phoebe's eyes filled. She was, in truth, waiting for judgement--at
the hands of her husband--and her daughter. Ever since their flight
together, Carrie had been taught to regard her father as dead. As
the years went on, 'poor papa' was represented to her by a few fading
memories, by the unframed picture which her mother kept jealously
locked from sight, which she had been only once or twice allowed to
see.

And now? Phoebe recalled the anguish of that night, when Carrie,
returning to her mother in Surrey, from a day's expedition to town,
with a Canadian friend, described the queer, passionate, grey-haired
man--'Mr. Fenwick, they called him'--whom she had seen directing
the rehearsal at the Falcon Theatre. Phoebe had a vision of herself
leaning back in her chair, wrapped in shawls, feigning the exhaustion
and blindness of nervous headache--while the child gave her laughing
account of the scene, in the intervals of kissing and comforting 'poor
mummy.'

And that drive f