‘Ah! you felt that?’ he said, eagerly—­’you felt that?  There’s a stuff they call curare.  You can’t move—­you’re paralysed—­but you feel horrible pain.  That’s what I used to feel like—­for months and months.  And then sometimes—­it was different—­as if I didn’t care twopence about anything, except a little bit of pleasure—­and should never vex myself about anything again.  One was dead, and it didn’t matter—­was rather pleasant indeed.’

She was silent.  Her seeking, pitiful eyes were on him perpetually, trying to make him out, to acquaint herself with this new personality, which spoke in these harsh staccato phrases—­to reconcile it with the exciteable, sanguine, self-confident man whom she had deserted in his youth.

‘Well,’ he resumed, ‘and what was your farmer like?’ Then, suddenly—­lifting his eyes—­’Did he make love to you?’

She coloured hotly, and threw back her head.

’And if he did, it was no one’s fault!—­neither his nor mine.  He wasn’t a bad fellow!—­and he wanted some one to look after his children.’

‘Naturally.  Quite content also to look after mine!’ said Fenwick, with a laugh which startled her—­resuming his agitated walk, a curious expression of satisfaction, triumph even, on his dark face.  ’So you found yourself in a false position?’

He stopped to look at her, and his smile hurt her sorely.  But she had made up her mind to a long patience, and she struggled on.

‘It was partly that made me come home—­that, and other things.’

‘What other things?’

‘Things—­I saw—­in some of the papers about you,’ she said, with difficulty.

’What—­that I was a flat failure?—­a quarrelsome ass, and that kind of thing?  You began to pity me?’

‘Oh, John, don’t talk to me like that?’ She held out her hands to him in appealing misery.  ’I was sorry, I tell you!—­I saw how I’d behaved to you.  I thought if you hadn’t been getting on, perhaps it was my fault.  It upset me altogether!’

But he didn’t relent.  He stood still—­fiercely interrogative—­his hands in his pockets, on the other side of the table.

‘And what else was there?’

Phoebe choked back her tears.

‘There was a woman—­who came to live near us—­who had been a maid—­’ She hesitated.

‘Please go on!’

’Maid to Madame de Pastourelles’—­she said, hastily, stumbling over the French name.

He exclaimed: 

‘In Ontario!’

’She married a man she had been engaged to for years; he’d been making a home for her out there.  I liked her directly I saw her; and she was too delicate for the life; she came in the fall, and the winter tried her dreadfully.  I used to go in to nurse her—­she was very much alone—­and she told me all about herself—­and about—­’

‘Madame?’

Phoebe nodded, her eyes swimming again in tears.

‘And you found out you’d been mistaken?’