‘Will you help me up to bed?’ he murmured—­as she was just going away.

She obeyed, and he leant on her shoulder as they mounted the steep cottage stair.  Her physical strength astonished him—­the amount of support that this child of seventeen was able to give him.

She led him into his room, where she had already brought his bag, and unpacked his things.

’Is it all right, father?  Do you want anything else?  Shall I send mother?’

‘No, no,’ he said, hastily—­’I’m all right.  Tell them I’m all right; I only want to go to sleep.’

She turned at the door, and looked at him wistfully.

‘I did make that mattress over—­part of it.  But it’s a real bad one.’

He nodded, and she went.

‘A dream!’ he said to himself—­’a dream!’

He was thinking of the child as she stood bathed in the mingled glory of sunset and moonlight flowing in upon her from the open window; for the long day of northern summer was still lingering in the valley.

‘Ah! if I could only paint!—­oh, God, if I could paint!’ he groaned aloud, rubbing his hands together in a fever of impotence and misery.

Then he tumbled into bed, and lay there weak and passive, feeling the strangeness of the remembered room, of the open casement window, of the sycamore outside, and the mountain forms beyond it; of this pearly or golden light in which everything was steeped.

In the silence he heard the voice of the beck, as it hurried down the ghyll.  Twelve years since he had heard it last; and the eternal water ‘at its priestlike task’ still murmured with the rocks, still drank the rain, and fed the river.  No rebellion there, no failure; no helpless will!

He tried to think of Phoebe, to remember what she had said to him.  He wondered if he had been merely brutal to her.  But his heart seemed a dry husk within him.  It was, as it had been.  He could neither think nor feel.

Next day he was so ill that a doctor was sent for.  He prescribed long rest, said all excitement must be avoided, all work put away.

Four or five dreary weeks followed.  Fenwick stayed in bed most of the day, struggled down to the garden in the afternoon, was nursed by the three women, and scarcely said a word from morning till night that was not connected with some bodily want or discomfort.  He showed no repugnance to his wife, would let her wait upon him, and sit beside him in the garden.  But he made no spontaneous movement towards her whatever; and the only person who evidently cheered him was Carrie.  He watched the child incessantly—­in her housework, her sewing, her gardening, her coaxing of her pale mother, her fun with Miss Anna, who was by now her slave.  There was something in the slight foreignness of her ways and accent, in her colonial resource and independence that delighted and amused him like a pleasant piece of acting.  She had the