Yet Phoebe had tried to make it plausible.  They were going to stay with an old friend, in a place which Carrie and her parents had lived in when she was a baby, near to the town where she was born.  She knew already that her mother was from Westmoreland, from a place called Keswick; but she understood that her mother’s father was dead, and all her people scattered.

Until they came actually in sight of the cottage, the child had betrayed no memory of her own; though as they entered Langdale her chatter ceased, and her eyes sped nervously from side to side, considering the woods and fells and whitewashed farms.  As they stopped, however, at the foot of the steep pitch leading to the little house, Carrie suddenly caught sight of it—­the slate porch, the yew-tree to the right, the sycamore in front.  She changed colour, and as she jumped down, she wavered and nearly fell.

And without waiting for the others she ran up the hill and through the gate.  When she met them again at the house-door, her eyes were wet.

‘I’ve been into the kitchen,’ she said, breathlessly—­’and it’s so strange!  I remember sitting there, and a man’—­she drew her hand across her brow—­’a man, feeding me.  That—­that was father?’

Phoebe could not remember how she had answered her; only some trembling words from Anna Mason, and an attempt to draw the child away—­that her mother might enter the cottage alone and unwatched.  And she had entered it alone—­had walked into the little parlour.

The next thing she recollected—­amid that passion of desperate tears which had seemed to dissolve her, body and soul—­were Carrie’s arms round her, Carrie’s face pressed against hers.

’Mother! mother!  Oh! what is the matter?  Why did we come here?  You’ve been keeping things from me all these weeks—­for years even.  There is something I don’t know—­I’m sure there is.  Oh, it is unkind.  You think I’m not old enough—­but I am.  Oh! you ought to tell me, mother!’

How had she defended herself? staved off the inevitable once again?  All she knew was that Miss Anna had again come to the rescue, had taken the child away, whispering to her.  And since then, in these last forty-eight hours—­oh!  Carrie had been good!  So quiet, so useful—­unpacking their clothes, helping Miss Anna’s maid with the supper, cooking, dusting, mending, as a Canadian girl knows how—­only stopping sometimes to look round her, with that clouded, wondering look, as though the past invaded her.

Oh! she was a darling!  John would see that—­whatever he might feel towards her mother.  ’I stole her—­but I’ve brought her back.  I may be a bad wife—­but there’s Carrie!  I’ve not neglected her—­I’ve done the best by her.’

It was in incoherent, unspoken words like this that Phoebe was for ever pleading with her husband, even now.

Presently, in her walk about the room, she came to stand before the mantelpiece, where a photograph had been propped up against the wall by Carrie—­of a white walled farm, with its out-buildings and orchards—­and, gleaming beneath it, the wide waters of Lake Ontario.  Phoebe shuddered at the sight of it.  Twelve years of her life had been wasted there.