Presently inquiry had been made from every management in London as to the touring companies of the year; confidential agents had been sent to every provincial town that possessed a theatre; long lists of names had been compiled and carefully scanned.  Fenwick’s drawing of the girl whom he had seen had been photographed; and some old likenesses of Phoebe and Carrie had been reproduced and attached to it, for the use of Messrs. Butlin’s provincial correspondents.  The police were appealed to; the best private detectives to be had were employed.

In vain!  The smiling child of seventeen had emerged for that one appearance on the stage of her father’s life, only, it seemed, to vanish again for ever.  No trace could be found anywhere of a ’Miss Larose,’ either as a true or a theatrical name; the photographs suggested nothing to those who saw them; or if various hints and clues sometimes seemed to present themselves, they led to no result.

Meanwhile, day after day, Fenwick waited on the post, hurrying for and scanning his letters with feverish, ever-waning hope.  Not a sign, not a word from Phoebe.  His heart grew fierce.  There were moments when he felt something not unlike hatred for this invisible woman, who was still able to lay a ghostly and sinister hand upon his life.  And yet, and yet!—­suppose, after all, that she were dead?

During these same weeks of torment The Queen’s Necklace was produced; it was a pretentious failure, and after three weeks of difficult existence flickered to an end.  The management went into bankruptcy, and the greater part of Fenwick’s payment was irrecoverable.  He could hardly now meet his daily living expenses, and there was an execution in his house, put in by the last firm of builders employed.

Close upon this disaster came the opening of his private exhibition.  Grimly, in a kind of dogged abstraction, he went through with it.  He himself, with the help of a lad who was his man-of-all-work in Chelsea, nailed up the draperies, hung the pictures, and issued the invitations for the private view.

About a hundred people came to the private view.  His reputation was not yet dead, and there was much curiosity about his circumstances.  But Fenwick, looking at the scanty crowd, considering the faces that were there and the faces that were not there, knew very well that it could be of no practical assistance to him.  Not a picture sold; and next day there were altogether seven people in the gallery, of whom five were the relations of men to whom he had given gratuitous teaching at one period or other of his career.