Phoebe had destroyed his life.  She had not only robbed him of herself and of their child, she had forced him into an acted lie which had poisoned his whole existence, and, first and foremost, that gracious and beautiful friendship which was all, save his art, that she had left him.  For, in the first moments of his despair and horror, he had remembered what it would mean to Madame de Pastourelles, did she ever know that his mad wife had left him out of jealousy of her.  He was not slow to imagine the effect of Phoebe’s action on that proud, pure nature and sensitive conscience; and he knew what she and her father must feel towards the deception which had led her into such a position, and made such a tragedy possible.  He foresaw her recoil, her bitter condemnation, the final ruin of the relation between himself and her; and yet more than these did he dread her pain, her causeless, innocent pain.  To stab the hand which had helped him, the heart which had already suffered so much, in the very first hours of his own shock and misery, he had shrunk from this, he had tried his best to protect Madame de Pastourelles.

Hence the compact with his landlady, by which he had in fact bribed her to silence, and transformed her into a devoted servant always under his eye; hence the various means by which he had found it possible to quiet the members of his own family and of Phoebe’s—­needy folk, most of them, cannily unwilling to make an enemy of a man who was likely, so they understood, to be rich, and who already showed a helpful disposition.  When once he had convinced himself that he had no clue, and that Phoebe had disappeared, it had not been difficult indeed to keep his secret, and to hide the traces of his own wrong-doing, his own share in the catastrophe.  Between Phoebe’s world and the world in which he was now to live, there were few or no links.  Bella Morrison might have supplied one.  But she and her mother had moved to Guernsey, and a year after Phoebe’s flight Fenwick ascertained that old Mrs. Morrison was dead, and that Bella had gone to South America as companion to a lady.

So in an incredibly short time the crisis was over.  The last phase was connected with the cousin—­Freddy Tolson—­who had visited Phoebe the night before her journey to London, and was now in New South Wales.

A letter from Fenwick to this young man, containing a number of questions as to his conversation with Phoebe, and written immediately after Phoebe’s flight, obtained an answer after some three or four months, but Tolson’s reply was wholly unprofitable.  He merely avowed that he had discovered nothing at all of Phoebe’s intention, and could throw no light whatever upon her disappearance.  The letter was laboriously written by a man of imperfect education, and barely covered three loosely written sides of ordinary note-paper.  It arrived when Fenwick’s own researches were already at a standstill, and seemed to leave nothing more to hope for.  The police inquiries which had been initiated went on intermittently for a while, then ceased; the waters of life closed over Phoebe Fenwick and her child.