At the same time there were much more serious causes of difference.  Each had a secret from the other.  Fenwick’s secret was that he had foolishly passed in London as an unmarried man, and that he could not take Phoebe back with him, because of the discomforts and risks in which a too early avowal of her would involve him.  He was morbidly conscious of this; brooded over it, and magnified it.

She on the other hand was tormented by a fixed idea—­already in existence at the time of their first parting, but much strengthened by loneliness and fretting—­that he was tired of her and not unwilling to be without her.  The joy of their meeting banished it for a time, but it soon came back.  She had never acquiesced in the wisdom of their separation; and to question it was to resent it more and more deeply—­to feel his persistence in it a more cruel offence, month by month.  Her pride prevented her from talking of it; but the soreness of her grievance invaded their whole relation.  And in her moral unrest she showed faults which had been scarcely visible in their early married years—­impatience, temper, suspicion, a readiness to magnify small troubles whether of health or circumstance.

During her months alone she had been reading many novels of an indifferent sort, which the carrier brought her from the lending library at Windermere.  She talked excitedly of some of them, had ‘cried her eyes out’ over this or that.  Fenwick picked up one or two, and threw them away for ‘trash.’  He scornfully thought that they had done her harm, made her more nervous and difficult.  But at night, when he had done his work, he never took any trouble to read to her, or to talk to her about other than household things.  He smoked or drew in silence; and she sat over her embroidery, lost in morbid reverie.

One morning he discovered amongst her books a paper-covered ’Life of Romney’—­a short compilation issued by a local bookseller.

‘Why, whatever did you get this for, Phoebe?’ he said, holding it up.

She looked up from her mending, and coloured.  ‘I wanted to read it.’

‘But why?’

‘Well’—­she hesitated—­’I thought it was like you.’

‘Like me?—­you little goose!’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, doggedly, looking hard at her work—­’there was the hundred pounds that he got to go to London with—­and then, marrying a wife in Kendal—­and’—­she looked up with a half-defiant smile—­’and leaving her behind!’

‘Oh! so you think that’s like me?’ he said, seating himself again at his drawing.

‘It’s rather like.’

‘You suppose you’re going to be left here for thirty years?’ He laughed as he spoke.

She laughed too, but not gaily—­with a kind of defiance.

’Well, it wouldn’t be quite as easy now, would it?—­with trains, and all that.  There were only coaches then, I suppose.  Now, London’s so near.’

‘I wish you’d always think so!’ he cried.  ’Why, of course it’s near.  I’m only seven hours away.  What’s that, in these days?  And in three months’ time, things will be all right and square again.’