‘I dare say,’ she said, sighing.

‘Why can’t you wait cheerfully?’ he asked, rather exasperated—­’instead of being so down.’

’Because’—­she broke out—­’I don’t see the reason of it—­there!  No, I don’t!—­However!’—­she pressed back her hair from her eyes and drew herself together.  ’You’ve never shown me your studies of that—­that lady—­John; you said you would.’

Relieved at the change of subject, he took a sketch-book out of his pocket and gave it to her.  It contained a number of ‘notes’ for his portrait of Madame de Pastourelles—­sketches of various poses, aspects of the head and face, arrangements of the hands, and so forth.  Phoebe pondered it in silence.

‘She’s pretty—­I think,’ she said, at last, doubtfully.

‘I’m not sure that she is,’ said Fenwick.  ‘She’s very pale.’

’That doesn’t matter.  The shape of her face is awfully pretty—­and her eyes.  Is her hair like mine?’

‘No, not nearly so good.’

‘Ah, if I could only do it as prettily as she does!’ said Phoebe, faintly smiling.  ‘I suppose, John, she’s very smart and fashionable?’

’Well, she’s Lord Findon’s daughter—­that tells you.  They’re pretty well at the top.’

Phoebe asked various other questions, then fell silent, still pondering the sketches.  After a while she put down her work and came to sit on a stool beside Fenwick, sometimes laying her golden head against his knee, or stretching out her hand to touch his.  He responded affectionately enough; but as the winter twilight deepened in the little room, Phoebe’s eyes, fixed upon the fire, resumed their melancholy discontent.  She was less necessary to him even than before; she knew by a thousand small signs that the forces which possessed his mind—­perhaps his heart!—­were not now much concerned with her.

She tried to control, to school herself.  But the flame within was not to be quenched—­was, indeed, perpetually finding fresh fuel.  How quietly he had taken the story of the tramp’s attack upon her!—­which still, whenever she thought of it, thrilled her own veins with horror.  No doubt he had been over to Ambleside to speak to the police; and he had arranged that the little servant, Daisy, should come to her when he left.  But if he had merely caught her to him with one shuddering cry of love and rage—­that would have been worth all his precautions!—­would have effaced the nightmare, and filled her heart.

As to his intellectual life, she was now much more conscious of her exclusion from it than she ever had been in their old life together.