And barely a week later, John Fenwick had been dining in St. James’s Square, looking harassed and ill indeed—­it was supposed, from overwork; but, to his best friends, as silent as that grave of darkness and oblivion which had closed over his wife.

Yet, as the weeks of thought went on, Eugenie blamed him less and less.  Her clear intelligence showed her all the steps of the unhappy business.  She remembered the awkward, harassed youth, as she had first seen him at her father’s table, with his curious mixture of arrogance and timidity; now haranguing the table, and now ready to die with confusion over some social slip.  She understood what he had told her, in his first piteous letter, of his paralysed, tongue-tied states—­of his fear of alienating her father and herself.  And she went deeper.  She confessed the hatefulness of those weakening timidities, those servile states of soul, by which our social machine balances the insolences and cruelties of the strong—­its own breeding also; she felt herself guilty because of them; the whole of life seemed to her sick, because a young man, ill at ease and cowardly in a world not his own, had told or lived a foolish lie.  It was as though she had forced it from him; she understood so well how it had come about.  No, no!—­her father might judge it as he pleased.  She was angry no longer.

Nor—­presently—­did she even resent the treachery of those weeks at Versailles, so quick and marvellous was the play of her great gift of sympathy, which was only another aspect of imagination.  In recoil from a dark moment of her own experience, of which she could never think without anguish, she had offered him a friend’s hand, a friend’s heart—­offered them eagerly and lavishly.  Had he done more than take them, with the craving of a man, for whom already the ways are darkening, who makes one last clutch at ’youth and bloom, and this delightful world’?  He had been reckless and cruel indeed.  But in its profound tenderness and humility and self-reproach her heart forgave him.

Yet of that forgiveness she could make no outward sign—­for her own sake and Phoebe’s.  That old relation could never be again; the weeks at Versailles had killed it.  Unless, indeed, some day it were her blessed lot to find the living Phoebe, and bring her to her husband!  Then friendship, as well as love, might perhaps lift its head once more.  And as during the months of winter, both before and since her departure from England, the tidings reached her of Fenwick’s growing embarrassments, of his increasing coarseness and carelessness of work, his violence of temper, the friend in her suffered profoundly.  She knew that she could still do much for him.  Yet there, in the way, stood the image of Phoebe, as Daisy Hewson described her,—­pale, weary, desperate,—­making all speech, all movement, on the part of the woman, for jealousy of whom the wife had so ignorantly destroyed herself and Fenwick, a thing impossible.