’That doesn’t follow at all.  Very likely he’d settled something on them, which can’t be touched.  A man like that generally does.’

‘Poor things!’ she said, shuddering.  ’But, John—­you’ll pay it back to Mrs. Morrison?’

‘Of course I shall,’ he said, impatiently—­’in due time.  But please remember, Phoebe, that’s my affair.  Don’t you talk of it—­to any one.’

He looked up to emphasise his words.

Phoebe flushed.

‘I wasn’t going to talk of it to any one,’ she said, proudly, as she moved away.

Presently he took up his hat again and went out, that he might be alone with his thoughts.  The rain had vanished; and a frosty sunshine sparkled on the fells, on the red bracken and the foaming becks.  He took the mountain-path which led past the ghyll, up to the ridge which separates Langdale from Grasmere and Easedale.  Morrison’s finely wrinkled face, with its blue, complacent eyes and thin nose, hovered before him—­now as he remembered it in life, and now as he imagined it in death.  Hard fate!  There had been an adventurous, poetic element in Morrison—­something beyond the ken of the ordinary Philistine—­and it had come to this.  Fenwick remembered him among the drawings he had collected.  Real taste—­real sense of beauty—­combined no doubt with the bargaining instinct and a natural love of chicanery.  Moreover, Fenwick believed that, so far as a grasping temper would allow, there had been a genuine wish to help undiscovered talent.  He thought of the hand which had given him the check, and had a vision of it holding the revolver—­of the ghastly, solitary end.  And no one had guessed—­unless, indeed, it were his wife?  Perhaps that look of hers—­as of a creature hunted by secret fears—­was now explained.

How common such things are!—­and probably, so ran his thoughts, will always be.  We are all acting.  Each man or woman carries this potentiality of a double life—­it is only a question of less or more.

Suddenly he coloured, as he saw himself thus writ double—­first as he appeared to Madame de Pastourelles, and then as he appeared to Phoebe.  Masquerading was easy, it seemed; and conscience made little fuss!  Instantly, however, the inner man rebelled against the implied comparison of himself with Morrison.  An accidental concealment, acquiesced in temporarily, for business reasons—­what had that in common with villainy like Morrison’s?  An awkward affair, no doubt; and he had been a fool to slip into it.  But in a few weeks he would put it right—­come what would.

As to the debt—­he tried to fight against a feeling of deliverance—­but clearly he need be in no hurry to pay it.  He had been living in dread of Morrison’s appearing in Bernard Street to claim his bond—­revealing Phoebe’s existence perhaps to ears unprepared—­and laying greedy hands upon the ‘Genius Loci.’  It would have been hard to keep him off it—­unless Lord Findon had promptly come forward—­and it would have been odious to yield it to him.  ‘Now I shall take my time.’  Of course, ultimately, he would repay the money to Mrs. Morrison and Bella.  But better, even in their interests, to wait a while, till there could be no question of any other claim to it.