Then he passed on to the young girl’s portrait—­the girl in white muslin, turning away her graceful head from the spectator, and showing thereby the delicacy of her profile, the wealth of her brown hair, the beauty of her young and virginal form.  Suddenly, his eyes clouded; he turned abruptly away, left the room without looking at another picture, and was soon hurrying through the crowded streets northward towards the Gare Saint-Lazare.

Carrie!—­his child!—­his own flesh and blood.  His heart cried out for her.  Watson’s brusquerie—­the young girl of the picture—­and his own bitter and disappointed temper—­they had all their share in the emotion which possessed him.

The child whom he remembered, with her mother’s eyes, and that light mutinous charm, which was not Phoebe’s—­why, she was now seventeen!—­a little younger—­only a little younger, than the girl of the portrait.  His longing fancy pursued her—­saw her a wild, pretty, laughing thing, nearly a woman—­and then fell back passionately on a more familiar image!—­of the baby at his knee, open-mouthed, her pink lips rounded for the tidbit just about to descend upon them, her sweet and sparkling eyes fixed upon her father.

’My God!—­where are they?—­are they alive, or dead?  How cruel—­cruel!’ And he ground his teeth in one of those paroxysms which every now and then, at long intervals, represented the return upon him of the indestructible past.  Often for months together it meant little or nothing to him, but the dull weight of his secret; twelve years had inevitably deadened feeling, and filled the mind with fresh interests, while of late the tumult of his Academy and Press campaign had silenced the stealing, distant voices.  Yet there were moments when all was as fresh and poignant as it had been in the first hours, when Phoebe, with her golden head and her light, springing step, seemed to move beside him, and he felt the drag of a small hand in his.

He stiffened himself—­like one attacked.  The ghosts of dead hours came trooping and eddying round him, like the autumn leaves that had begun to strew the Paris streets—­all the scenes of that first ghastly week when he had hunted in desperation for his lost wife and child.  His joyous return from Chelsea, on the evening of his good-fortune—­Mrs. Gibbs’s half-sulky message on the door-step that ‘Mrs. Fenwick’ was in the studio—­his wild rush upstairs—­the empty room, the letter, the ring:—­his hurried journey North—­the arrival at the Langdale cottage, only to find on the table of the deserted parlour another letter from Phoebe, written before she left Westmoreland, in the prevision that he would come there in search of a clue, and urging him for both their sakes to make no scandal, no hue and cry, to accept the inevitable, and let her go in peace—­his interview with the servant Daisy, who had waited with the child in an hotel close to Euston, while Phoebe went to Bernard Street, and had been sent back to the North immediately after Phoebe’s return, without the smallest indication of what her mistress meant to do—­his fruitless consultations with Anna Mason!—­the whole dismal story rose before him, as it was wont to do periodically, filling him with the same rage, the same grief, the same fierce and inextinguishable resentment.