Meanwhile, as in their farewell talk beside the ghyll eight months before, her mood gradually and insensibly changed.  Whatever unloving thoughts or resentments had held her in the first hour of their meeting, however strong had been the wish to show him that she had been lonely and suffering, she could not resist what to her was the magic of his presence.  As he moved about in the low, firelit room, and she watched him, her whole nature melted; and he knew it.

Presently she took the child upstairs.  He waited for her, hanging over the fire—­listening to the storm outside—­and thinking, thinking—­

When she reappeared, and he, looking round, saw her standing in the doorway, so tall and slender, her pale face and hair coloured by the glow of the fire, passion and youth spoke in him once more.

He sprang up and caught her in his arms.  Presently, sitting in the old armchair beside the blaze, he had gathered her on his knee, and she had clasped her hands round his neck, and buried her face against him.  All things were forgotten, save that they were man and wife together, within this ’wind-warm space’—­ringed by night, and pattering sleet, and gusts that rushed in vain upon the roof that sheltered them.

But next morning, within the little cottage—­beating rain on the windows, and a cheerless storm-light in the tiny rooms—­the hard facts of the situation resumed their sway.  In the first place money questions had to be faced.  Fenwick made the most of his expectations; but at best they were no more, and how to live till they became certainties was the problem.  If Lord Findon had commissioned the portrait, or definitely said he would purchase the ‘Genius Loci,’ some advance might have been asked for.  As it was, how could money be mentioned yet a while?  Phoebe had a fine and costly piece of embroidery on hand, commissioned through an ‘Art Industry’ started at Windermere the summer before; but it could not be finished for some weeks, possibly months, and the money Fenwick proposed to earn during his fortnight in the North by some illustrations long overdue had been already largely forestalled.  He gloomily made up his mind to appeal to an old cousin in Kendal, the widow of a grocer, said to be richly left, who had once in his boyhood given him five shillings.  With much distaste he wrote the letter and walked to Elterwater in the rain to post it.  Then he tried to work; but little Carrie, fractious from confinement indoors, was troublesome and disturbed him.  Phoebe, too, would make remarks on his drawing which seemed to him inept.  In old days he would have laughed at her for pretending to know, and turned it off with a kiss.  Now what she said set him on edge.  The talk he had been living amongst had spoilt him for silly criticisms.  Moreover, for the first time he detected in her a slight tone of the ’schoolmarm’—­didactic and self-satisfied, without knowledge.  The measure Madame de Pastourelles had dealt out to him, he in some sort avenged on Phoebe.