its bed, and its bit of green carpet. Thoughts passed
through her mind--thoughts which shook her from head to foot.

The cottage was now enlarged. Miss Mason, when she took it on lease
three years before this date, had built two new rooms, or got the
Hawkshead landlord to build them. She had retired now, on her savings;
and there lived with her an old friend, a tired teacher like herself.
It was one of those spinster marriages--honourable and seemly
_menages_--for which the Lakes have always been famous. But Miss
Wetherby was now away, visiting her relations in the South. Had she
been there, Phoebe could never have made up her mind to accept Miss
Anna's urgent invitation. She shrank from everybody--strangers, or old
acquaintance--it was all one. The terror which ranked, in her mind,
next to the disabling, heart-arresting terror of the first meeting
with her husband, was that of the first moment when she must discover
herself to her old acquaintance in Langdale or Elterwater--in Kendal
or Keswick--as Phoebe Fenwick. She had arrived, closely veiled, as
'Mrs. Wilson,' and she had never yet left the cottage door.

Then again she caught her breath, remembering that at that very moment
Carrie was learning her true name from Miss Anna--was realising that
she had seen her father without knowing it--was hearing the story of
what her mother had done.

'Perhaps she'll hate me!' thought Phoebe, miserably. Through the
window came the soft spring air. The big sycamore opposite was nearly
in full leaf, and in the field below sprawled the helpless, new-born
lambs, so white beside their dingy mothers. The voice of the river
murmured through the valley, and sometimes, as the west wind blew
stronger, Phoebe's fine and long-practised ear could distinguish other
and more distant sounds, wafted from the leaping waterfalls which
threaded the ghyll, perhaps even from the stream of Dungeon Ghyll
itself, thundering in its prison of rocks. It was a characteristic
Westmoreland day, with high grey cloud and interlacing sun, the fells
clear from base to top, their green or reddish sides marked with white
farms or bold clumps of fir; with the blackness of scattered yews,
landmarks through generations; or the purple-grey of the emerging
limestone. Fresh, lonely, cheerful--a land at once of mountain
solitude, and of a long-settled, long-humanised life--it breathed
kindly on this penitent, anxious woman; it seemed to bid her take
courage.

Ah! the