Yes, he was a great, great friend—­and, somehow, she must help him!  Her lips parted in a sigh of aspiration.  If only this unlucky thing had not happened!—­this meeting of Arthur and of Fenwick, before the time, before she had prepared and engineered it.

And so she came to her second topic of meditation.  Gradually as her mind pursued it, her aspect seemed to lose its new and tremulous brightness; the face became once more a little grey and pinched.  They had somehow missed all the letters which should have warned them.  To find Arthur established here, with his poor invalid wife—­nothing had been more unexpected, and, alack, more unwelcome, considering the relations between them and John Fenwick—­Fenwick who was practically her father’s guest and hers.

Did Arthur think it strange, unkind?  Wouldn’t he really believe that it was pure accident!  If so, it would be only because Elsie was there, influencing him against his old friends—­poor, bitter, stricken Elsie.  Eugenie’s lips quivered.  There flitted before her the image of the girl of eighteen—­muse of laughter and delight.  And she recalled the taciturn woman whom she had seen on her sofa the night before, speaking coldly, in dry, sharp sentences, to her husband, her cousin, her maid—­evidently unhappy and in pain.

Eugenie shaded her eyes from the light of the terrace.  Her heart seemed to be sinking, contracting.  Mrs. Welby had been already ill, and therewith jealous and tyrannical, for some little time before Madame de Pastourelles had been summoned to the death-bed of her husband!  But now!—­Eugenie shrank aghast before what she saw and what she guessed.

And it was, too, as if the present state of things—­as if the new hardness in Elsie’s eyes, and the strange hostility of her manner, especially towards the Findons, and her cousin Eugenie—­threw light on earlier years, on many a puzzling trait and incident of the past.

There had been a terrible confinement, at the end of years of childlessness—­a still-born child—­and then, after a short apparent recovery, a rapid loss of strength and power.  Poor, poor Elsie!  But why—­why should this trouble have awakened in her this dumb tyranny towards Arthur, this alienation from Arthur’s friends?

Eugenie sharply drew herself together.  She banished her thoughts.  Elsie was young, and would get well.  And when she recovered, she would know who were her friends, and Arthur’s.

A figure came towards her, crossing the parterre d’eau.  She perceived her father—­just released, no doubt, from two English acquaintances with whom he had been exploring the ‘Bosquet d’Apollon.’