How long he lost himself in this passion of egotism and defiance he hardly knew.  He was roused from it by the servant bringing a lamp; and as she set it down, the light fell upon a memorandum scrawled on the edge of a sketch which was lying on the table:  ‘Feb. 21—­10 o’clock.’

His mood collapsed.  He sat down by the dying fire, brooding and miserable.  How on earth was he going to get through the next few weeks?  Abominable!—­thoughtlessly cruel!—­that neither Lord Findon nor Madame de Pastourelles should ever yet have spoken to him of money!  These months of work on the portrait—­this constant assumption on the part of the Findon circle that both the portrait and the ‘Genius Loci’ were to become Findon possessions—­and yet no sum named—­no clear agreement even—­nothing, as it seemed to Fenwick’s suspicious temper, in either case, that really bound Lord Findon.  ’Write to the old boy’—­so Cuningham had advised again and again—­’get something definite out of him.’  But Fenwick had once or twice torn up a letter of the kind in morbid pride and despair.  Suppose he were rebuffed?  That would be an end of the Findon connexion, and he could not bring himself to face it.  He must keep his entree to the house; above all, he clung to the portrait and the sittings.

But the immediate outlook was pretty dark.  He was beginning to be pestered with debts and duns—­the appointment on the morrow was with an old frame-maker who had lent him twenty pounds before Christmas, and was now begging piteously for his money.  There was nothing to pay him with—­nothing to send Phoebe, in spite of a constant labour at paying jobs in black-and-white that often kept him up till three or four in the morning.  He wondered whether Watson would help him with a loan.  According to Cuningham, the queer fellow had private means.

The fact was he was overstrained—­he knew it.  The year had been the hardest of his life, and now that he was approaching the time of crisis—­the completion of his two pictures, the judgement of the Academy and the public, his nerve seemed to be giving way.  As he thought of all that success or failure might mean, he plunged into a melancholy no less extravagant than the passion of self-confidence from which he had emerged.  Suppose that he fell ill before the pictures were finished—­what would become of Phoebe and the child?

As he thought of Phoebe, suddenly his heart melted within him.  Was she, too, hating the hours?  As he bowed his head on his arms a few hot, unwilling tears forced themselves into his eyes.  Had he been unkind and harsh to her?—­his poor little Phoebe!  An imperious impulse seemed to sweep him back into her arms.  She was his own, his very own; one flesh with him; of the same clay, the same class, the same customs and ideals.  Let him only recover her, and his child—­and live his own life as he pleased.  No more dependence on the moods of fine people.  He hated them all!  Clearly he had offended Madame de Pastourelles.  Perhaps she would not sit again—­the portrait would be thrown on his hands—­because he had not behaved with proper deference to her spoilt and petted favourite.