cottage under her thumb.  By now she had cleaned all the furniture, ‘coloured’ most of the walls, and mended all the linen, which had been in a sad condition—­Miss Anna’s powers being rather intellectual than practical.  And through it all she kept a natural daintiness and refinement, was never clumsy, or loud, or untidy.  She came and went so lightly—­and always bringing with her the impression of something hidden and fragrant, a happiness within, that gave a dancing grace and perfume to all her life.

To her father she chattered mostly of Canada, and he would sit in the shade of the cottage, listening to her while she described their life; the big, rambling farm, the children she had been brought up with, the great lake with its ice and its storms, the apple-orchards, the sleighing in winter, the beauty of the fall, the splendour of the summers, the boom that was beginning ‘up west.’  Cunningly, in fact, she set the stage for an actor to come; but his ‘cue’ was not yet.

It was only from her, indeed, that he would hear of these things.  If Phoebe ventured on them his manner stiffened at once.  Miss Anna’s strong impression was, still, that with his wife he was always on his guard against demands he felt himself physically unable to meet.  Yet it seemed to her, as time went on, that he was more and more aware of Phoebe, more sensitive to her presence, her voice.

She too watched Phoebe, and with a growing, involuntary respect.  This changed woman had endured ‘hardness,’ had at last followed her conscience; and, rebuffed and unforgiven as she seemed to be, she was clothed none the less in a new dignity, modest and sad, but real.  She might be hopeless of recovering her husband; but all the same, the law which links that strange thing, spiritual peace, with certain surrenders, had already begun to work, unknown even to herself.

As she moved about the cottage and garden, indeed, new contacts, new relations, slowly established themselves, unseen and unexpressed, between her and the man who scarcely noticed her in words, from morning till night.  ‘I should offend you twenty times a day,’ he had said to her—­’and perhaps it might be the same with me!’ But they did not offend each other!—­that was the merciful new fact, asserting itself through this silent, suspended time.  She was still beautiful.  The mountain air restored her clear, pure colour; and what time had robbed her of in bloom it had given her back in character—­the artist’s supreme demand.  Self-control, bitterly learnt—­fresh capacities, moral or practical—­these expressed themselves in a thousand trifles.  Not only in her tall slenderness and fairness was she presently a challenge to Fenwick’s sharpening sense; she began, in a wholly new degree, to interest his intelligence.  Her own had blossomed; and in spite of grief, she had brought back with her some of the ways of a young and tiptoe world.  Soon he was, in secret, hungry for her history—­the history he had so far