‘Twelve years!’ he said, slowly, after a minute, his eyes plunging into hers—­’twelve years!  What do you know of me now?—­or I of you?  I should offend you twenty times a day.  And—­perhaps—­it might be the same with me.’

Phoebe released herself, and laid her head against his knee.

‘John!—­take me back—­take me back!’

‘Why did you torture me?’ he said, hoarsely.  ’You sent me Carrie six weeks ago—­and then swept her away again.’

She cried out.  ‘It was the merest accident!’ And volubly—­abjectly—­she explained.

He listened to her, but without seeming to understand—­his own mind working irrelevantly all the time.  And presently he interrupted her.

’Besides—­I’m unhinged—­I’m not fit to have women dependent on me.  I can’t answer for myself.  Yesterday—­if that picture had come at eight o’clock instead of seven—­it would have been too late!’

His voice altered strangely.

Phoebe fell back upon the floor, huddled together—­staring at him.

‘What do you mean?’

’I should have destroyed myself.  That’s what I mean.  I had made up my mind.  It was just touch and go.’

Phoebe sat speechless.  It seemed as though her eyes—­so wide and terrified—­were fixed in their places, and could not release him.  He moved impatiently; the appeal, the horror of them, were more than he could bear.

’And much better for you if I had!—­and as for Carrie!—­Ah!—­good Heavens! there she is.’

He sprang up in agitation, looking through the open window, yet withdrawing from it.  Phoebe too rose, the colour rushing back into her cheeks.  This was to be her critical, her crucial moment.  If she recovered him, she was to owe it to her child.

Carrie and Miss Mason came along the path together.  They had been in a wood beside the Elterwater road; not knowing how to talk to each other; wandering apart, and gathering flowers idly, to pass the time.  Carrie held a large bunch of bluebells in her hand.  She wore a cotton dress of greyish-blue, just such a dress as Phoebe might have worn in her first youth.  The skirt was short, and showed her tripping feet.  Under her shady hat with its pink rose, her eyes glanced timidly towards the house, and then withdrew themselves again.  Fenwick saw that the eyes were in truth darker than Phoebe’s, and the hair much darker—­no golden mist like her mother’s, but nearer to his own—­a warm brown, curly and vigorous.  Her face was round and rosy, but so delicately cut and balanced, it affected him with a thrill of delight.  He perceived also that she was very small—­smaller than he had thought, in the theatre.  But at the same time, her light proportions had in them no hint of weakness or fragility.  If she were a fairy, she was no twilight spirit, but rather a cheerful dawn-fairy—­one of those happy household sprites that help the work of man.

He went and opened the door for them, trembling.