‘Perhaps she’ll hate me!’ thought Phoebe, miserably.  Through the window came the soft spring air.  The big sycamore opposite was nearly in full leaf, and in the field below sprawled the helpless, new-born lambs, so white beside their dingy mothers.  The voice of the river murmured through the valley, and sometimes, as the west wind blew stronger, Phoebe’s fine and long-practised ear could distinguish other and more distant sounds, wafted from the leaping waterfalls which threaded the ghyll, perhaps even from the stream of Dungeon Ghyll itself, thundering in its prison of rocks.  It was a characteristic Westmoreland day, with high grey cloud and interlacing sun, the fells clear from base to top, their green or reddish sides marked with white farms or bold clumps of fir; with the blackness of scattered yews, landmarks through generations; or the purple-grey of the emerging limestone.  Fresh, lonely, cheerful—­a land at once of mountain solitude, and of a long-settled, long-humanised life—­it breathed kindly on this penitent, anxious woman; it seemed to bid her take courage.

Ah! the sound of a horn echoing along the fell.  Phoebe flew down to the porch; then, remembering she might be seen, perhaps recognised, by the postman, she stepped back into the parlour, listening, but out of sight.

The servant, who had run down to fetch the letters, seemed to be having something of an argument with the postman.  In a few minutes she reappeared, breathless.

‘There’s no letters, mum,’ she said, seeing Phoebe at the parlour window—­’and I doan’t think this has owt to do here.’  She held up a telegram, doubtfully—­yet with an evident curiosity and excitement in her look.  It was addressed to ‘Mrs. John Fenwick.’  The postman had clearly made some remark upon it.

Phoebe took it.

‘It’s all right.  Tell him to leave it.’

The girl, noticing her agitation and her shaking fingers, ran down the hill again to give the message.  Phoebe carried the telegram upstairs to her room, and locked the door.

For some moments she dared not open it.  If it said that he refused to come?—­that he would never see her again?  Phoebe felt that she should die of grief—­that life must stop.

At last she tore it open: 

Sending messenger to-day.  Hope to follow immediately.  Welcome.

She gasped over the words, feeling them in the first instance as a blow—­a repulse.  She had feared—­but also she had hoped—­she scarcely knew for what—­yet at least for something more, something different from this.

He was not coming, then, at once!  A messenger!  What messenger could a man send to his wife in such a case?  Who knew them both well enough to dare to come between them?  Old fiercenesses woke up in her.  Had the word been merely cold and unforgiving it would have crushed her indeed; but there was that in her which would have scarcely dared complain.  An eye for an eye—­no conscience-stricken creature but admits the wild justice of that.