What was Fenwick’s present feeling towards his wife?  If amid this crowded Paris he had at last beheld her coming to him, had seen the tall figure and the childish look, and the lovely, pleading eyes, would his heart have leapt within him?—­would his hands have been outstretched to enfold and pardon her?—­or would he have looked at her sombrely, unable to pass the gulf between them—­to forget what she had done?

In truth, he could not have answered the question; he was uncertain of himself.  Her act, by its independence, its force of will, and the ability she had shown in planning and carrying it out, had transformed his whole conception of her.  In a sense, he knew her no longer.  That she could do a thing at once so violent and so final, was so wholly out of keeping with all his memories of her, that he could only think of the woman who had come in his absence to the Bernard Street studio, and defaced the sketch of Madame de Pastourelles, as in some sort a stranger—­one whom, were she to step back into his life, he would have had to learn afresh.  Sometimes, when anything reminded him of her suddenly—­as, for instance, the vision in a shop-window of the very popular mezzotint which had been made from the ‘Genius Loci’ the year after its success in the Academy—­the pang from which he suffered would seem to show that he still loved her, as indeed he had always loved her, through all the careless selfishness of his behaviour.  But, again, there were many months when she dropped altogether—­or seemed to drop—­out of his mind and memory, when he was entirely absorbed in the only interests she had left him—­his art, his quarrels, and his relation to Eugenie de Pastourelles.

There was a time, indeed—­some two or three years after the catastrophe—­when he passed through a stage of mental and moral tumult, natural to a man of strong passions and physique.  Even in their first married life, Phoebe had been sometimes jealous, and with reason.  It was her memory of these occasions that had predisposed her to the mad suspicion which wrecked her.  And when she had deserted him, he came violently near, on one or two occasions, to things base and irreparable.  But he was saved—­first by the unconscious influence, the mere trust, of a good woman—­and, secondly, by his keen and advancing intelligence.  Dread lest he should cast himself out of Eugenie’s delightful presence; and the fighting life of the mind:  it was by these he was rescued, by these he ultimately conquered.

And yet, was it, perhaps, his bitterest grievance against his wife that she had, in truth, left him nothing!—­not even friendship, not even art.  In so wrenching herself from him, she had perpetuated in him that excitable and unstable temper it should have been her first object to allay, and had thus injured and maimed his artistic power; while at the same time she had so troubled, so falsified his whole attitude towards the woman who on his wife’s disappearance from his life had become naturally and insensibly his dearest friend, that not even the charm of Madame de Pastourelles’ society, of her true, delicate, and faithful affection, could give him any lasting happiness.  He himself had begun the falsification, but it was Phoebe’s act which had prolonged and compelled it, through twelve years.