Phoebe Fenwick was a tall, slender creature, very young; with a little golden head on a thin neck, features childishly cut, and eyes that made the chief adornment of a simple face.  The lines of the brow, the lids and lashes, and the clear brown eye itself were indeed of a most subtle and distinguished beauty; they accounted, perhaps, for the attention with which most persons of taste and cultivation observed Fenwick’s wife.  For the eyes seemed to promise a character, a career; whereas the rest of the face was no more, perhaps, than a piece of agreeable pink-and-white.

She wore a dress of dark-blue cotton, showing the spring of her beautiful throat.  The plain gown with its long folds, the uncovered throat, and rich simplicity of her fair hair had often reminded Fenwick and a few of his patrons of those Florentine photographs which now, since the spread of the later Pre-Raphaelites and the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, were to be seen even in the shops of country towns.  There was a literary gentleman in Kendal who said that Mrs. Fenwick was like one of Ghirlandajo’s tall women in Santa Maria Novella.  Phoebe had sometimes listened uncomfortably to these comparisons.  She was a Cumberland girl, and had no wish at all to be like people in Italy.  It seemed somehow to cut her off from her own folk.

‘John is late!’ said a voice beside her.  An elderly woman had stepped out of the cottage porch.  Miss Anna Mason, the head-mistress of an endowed girls school in Hawkshead, had come to spend a Saturday afternoon with her old pupil, Phoebe Fenwick.  A masterful-looking woman—­ample in figure, with a mouth of decision.  She wore a grey alpaca dress, adorned with a large tatted collar, made by herself, and fastened by a brooch containing a true-lover’s knot in brown hair.

‘He’ll have stayed on to finish,’ said Phoebe, looking round.  ’Where’s Carrie?’

Miss Mason replied that the child wouldn’t wait any longer for her supper, and that Daisy, the little servant, was feeding her.  Then, slipping her arm inside Mrs. Fenwick’s, Miss Mason looked at the sunset.

‘It’s a sweet little cottage,’ she said, shading her eyes from the fast-sinking orb, and then turning them on the tiny house—­’but I dare say you’ll not be here long, Phoebe.’

Mrs. Fenwick started.

‘John told Mr. Harrock he’d pay him rent for it till next Easter.’

Miss Mason laughed.

‘Are you going to let John go wasting his time here till next Easter?’

The arm she held moved involuntarily.

‘He has several commissions—­people not far from here,’ said Mrs. Fenwick, hurriedly.  ’And if the weather’s too bad, we can always go to rooms in Kendal or Ambleside.’

’Well, if that’s what you’re thinking of, my dear, you’d better make a clerk of him at once and have done with it!  He told me his uncle would always find him work in the upholstery business.’

Phoebe’s soft cheeks trembled a little.