Carrie, indeed, took a very different view.

Restlessly the mother left her room and wandered into Carrie’s.  It was already—­by half-past nine—­spotlessly clean and neat; and Eliza, the girl from Hawkshead, had not been allowed to touch it.  On the bed lay a fresh ‘waist,’ which Carrie had just made for herself, and on the dressing-table stood another photograph—­not a place this time, but a person—­a very evident and very good-looking young man!

Phoebe stood looking at it forlornly.  Carrie’s young romance—­and her own spoilt life—­these two images held her.  Carrie would go back, in time, across the sea—­would marry, would forget her mother.

‘And I’m not old, neither—­I’m not old.’

Trembling she left the room.  The door of Miss Anna’s was open.  Phoebe stood on the threshold, looking in.  It had been her room and John’s in the old days.  Their very furniture was still there—­as in the parlour, too.  For John had sold it all to their landlord, when he wound up affairs.  Miss Anna knew even what he had got for it—­poor John!

She dared not go in.  She stood leaning against the door-post, looking from outside, like one in exile, at the low-raftered room, with its oak press, and its bed, and its bit of green carpet.  Thoughts passed through her mind—­thoughts which shook her from head to foot.

The cottage was now enlarged.  Miss Mason, when she took it on lease three years before this date, had built two new rooms, or got the Hawkshead landlord to build them.  She had retired now, on her savings; and there lived with her an old friend, a tired teacher like herself.  It was one of those spinster marriages—­honourable and seemly menages—­for which the Lakes have always been famous.  But Miss Wetherby was now away, visiting her relations in the South.  Had she been there, Phoebe could never have made up her mind to accept Miss Anna’s urgent invitation.  She shrank from everybody—­strangers, or old acquaintance—­it was all one.  The terror which ranked, in her mind, next to the disabling, heart-arresting terror of the first meeting with her husband, was that of the first moment when she must discover herself to her old acquaintance in Langdale or Elterwater—­in Kendal or Keswick—­as Phoebe Fenwick.  She had arrived, closely veiled, as ‘Mrs. Wilson,’ and she had never yet left the cottage door.

Then again she caught her breath, remembering that at that very moment Carrie was learning her true name from Miss Anna—­was realising that she had seen her father without knowing it—­was hearing the story of what her mother had done.