Hence, during November and December, constant meetings and consultations in the well-known offices of Lord Findon’s solicitors.  At these meetings both Madame de Pastourelles and her father had been often present, and she had followed the debates with a quick and strained intelligence, which often betrayed to Fenwick the suffering behind.  He painfully remembered with what gentleness and chivalry Eugenie had always treated him personally on these occasions, with what anxious generosity she had tried to curb her father.

But there had been no private conversation between them.  Not only did they shrink from it; Lord Findon could not have borne it.  The storm of family and personal pride which the disclosure of Fenwick’s story had aroused in the old man had been of a violence impossible to resist.  That Fenwick’s obscure and crazy wife should have dared to entertain jealousy of a being so far above his ken and hers, as Eugenie then was—­that she should have made a ridiculous tragedy out of it—­and that Fenwick should have conduced to the absurd and insulting imbroglio by his ill-bred and vulgar concealment:—­these things were so irritating to Lord Findon that they first stimulated a rapid recovery from his illness at Versailles, and then led him to frantic efforts on Phoebe’s behalf, which were in fact nothing but the expression of his own passionate pride and indignation—­resting, no doubt ultimately, on those weeks at Versailles when even he, with all the other bystanders, had supposed that Eugenie would marry this man.  His mood, indeed, had been a curious combination of wounded affection with a class arrogance stiffened by advancing age and long indulgence.  When, in those days, the old man entered the room where Fenwick was, he bore his grey head and sparkling eyes with the air of a teased lion.

Fenwick, a man of violent temper, would have found much difficulty in keeping the peace under these circumstances, but for the frequent presence of Eugenie, and the pressure of his own dull remorse.  ’I too—­have—­much to forgive!’—­that, he knew well, would be the only reference involving personal reproach that he would ever hear from her lips, either to his original deceit, or to those wild weeks at Versailles (that so much ranker and sharper offence!)—­when, in his loneliness and craving, he had gambled both on her ignorance and on Phoebe’s death.  Yet he did not deceive himself.  The relation between them was broken; he had lost his friend.  Her very cheerfulness and gentleness somehow enforced it.  How natural!—­how just!  None the less his bitter realisation of it had worked with crushing effect upon a miserable man.

About Christmas, Lord Findon’s health had again caused his family anxiety.  He was ordered to Cannes, and Eugenie accompanied him.  Before she went she had gone despairingly once more through all the ingenious but quite fruitless inquiries instituted by the lawyers; and she had written a kind letter to Fenwick begging to be kept informed, and adding at the end a few timid words expressing her old sympathy with his work, and her best wishes for the success of the pictures that she understood he was to exhibit in the spring.