prosperous development of the writer—­he declined to come, repeating that he knew nothing whatever of his Cousin Phoebe’s where-abouts, nor of her reasons for leaving her husband.  He gave a fresh and longer account of his conversation with her, as far as he could remember it at this distance of time; and this longer account contained the remark that she had asked him questions about other colonies than Australia, to which he was himself bound.  He thought Canada had been mentioned—­the length of the passage there, and its cost.  He had not paid much attention to it at the time.  It had seemed to him that she was glad, poor thing, of some one to have a ‘crack’ with—­’for I guess she’d been pretty lonesome up there.’  But she might have had something in her head—­he couldn’t say.  All he could declare was that if she were in Canada, or any other of the colonies, he had had no hand in it, and knew no more than a ’born baby’ where she might be hidden.

So now, on this vague hint, a number of fresh inquiries were to be set on foot.  Fenwick hoped nothing from them.  Yet as he walked fast through the London streets, from which the fog was lifting, his mind wrestled with vague images of great lakes, and virgin forests, and rolling wheat-lands—­of the streets of Montreal, or the Heights of Quebec—­and amongst them, now with one background, now with another, the slender figure of a fair-haired woman with a child beside her.  And through his thoughts, furies of distress and fear pursued him—­now as always.

‘Well, this is a queer go, isn’t it?’ said Watson, in a half-whispering voice.  ’Nature has horrid ways of killing you.  I wish she’d chosen a more expeditious one with me.’

Fenwick sat down beside his friend, the lamp-light in the old panelled room revealing, against his will, his perturbed and shaken expression.

‘How did this come on?’ he asked.

’Of itself, my dear fellow’—­laughed Watson, in the same hoarse whisper.  ’My right lung has been getting rotten for a year past, and at Marseilles it happened to break.  That’s my explanation, anyway, and it does as well as the doctor’s.—­Well, how are you?’

Fenwick shifted uneasily, and made a vague answer.

Watson turned to look at him.

‘What pictures have you on hand?’

Fenwick gave a list of the completed pictures still in his studio, and described the arrangements made to exhibit them.  He was not as ready as usual to speak of himself; his gaze and his attention were fixed upon his friend.  But Watson probed further, into the subjects of his recent work.  Fenwick was nearing the end, he explained, of a series of rustic ‘Months’ with their appropriate occupations—­an idea which had haunted his mind for years.

‘As old as the hills,’ said Watson, ’but none the worse for that.  You’ve painted them, I suppose, out-of-doors?’

Fenwick shrugged his shoulders.

‘As much as possible.’