ke a quick movement towards
her--only to check himself in shyness or pride.

Meanwhile he could not know that he too had grown in her eyes, as she
in his. In spite of all his errors and follies, he had not wrestled
with his art, he had not lived among his intellectual peers, he had
not known Eugenie de Pastourelles through twelve years, for nothing.
Embittered he was, but also refined. The nature had grown harsher and
more rugged--but also larger, more complex, more significant,
better worth the patiences of love. As for his failure, the more
she understood it, the more it evoked in her an angry advocacy, a
passionate championship, a protesting faith--which she had much ado to
hide.

And all this time letters came occasionally from Madame de
Pastourelles--indifferently to her or to him--full of London artistic
gossip, the season being now in full swim, of sly stimulus and cheer.
As they handed them to each other, without talking of them, it was as
though the shuttle of fate flew from life to life--these in Langdale,
and that in London--weaving the three into a new pattern which day by
day replaced and hid away the old.

The days lengthened towards midsummer. After a spell of rain, June
descended in blossom and sunshine on the Westmoreland vales. The
hawthorns were out, and the wild cherries. The bluebells were
fading in the woods, but in the cottage gardens the lilacs were all
fragrance, and the crown-imperials showed their heads of yellow and
red. Each valley and hillside was a medley of soft and shimmering
colour, save in the higher, austerer dales, where, as in Langdale,
the woods scarcely climb, and the bare pastures have only a livelier
emerald to show, or the crags a warmer purple, as their testimony to
the spring.

Fenwick was unmistakeably better. The signs of it were visible in many
directions. His passive, silent ways, so alien to his natural self and
temperament, were at last breaking down.

One evening, Carrie, who had been to Elterwater, brought back some
afternoon letters. They included a letter from Canada, which Carrie
read over her mother's shoulder, laughing and wondering. Phoebe was
sitting on a bench in the garden, an old yew-tree just above her on
the slope. The heads of both mother and child were thrown out sharply
on the darkness of the yew background--Phoebe's profile, upturned, and
the abundant coils of her hair, were linked in harmonious line with
the bending figure and beautiful head of