She wrote back with passion—­like one throwing herself on his breast.  The letter was long and incoherent, written at night beside Carrie’s bed—­and borrowing much, unconsciously, from the phraseology of the novels she still got from Bowness.  Alack! it is to be feared that John Fenwick—­already at another point in spiritual space when the letter reached him—­gave it but a hasty reading.

But, for the time, it was an untold relief to the writer.  Afterwards, she settled down to wait again, working meanwhile night and day at her beautiful embroidery that John had designed for her.  Miss Anna came to see her, exclaimed at her frail looks, wanted to lend her money.  Phoebe in a new exaltation, counting the weeks, and having still three or four sovereigns in the drawer, refused—­would say nothing about their straits.  John, she declared, was on the eve of an enormous success.  It would be all right presently.

* * * * *

Weeks passed.  The joy of that one golden letter faded; and gradually the shadows re-closed about her.  Fenwick’s letters dwindled again to post-cards, and then almost ceased.  When the hurried lines came, the strain and harass expressed in them left no room for affection.  Something wrong with the ’Genius Loci’!—­some bad paints—­hours of work needed to get the beastly thing right—­the portrait still far from complete—­but the dress would be a marvel!—­without quenching the head in the least.  And not a loving word!—­scarcely an inquiry after the child.

April came.  The little shop in the neighbouring village gave Mrs. Fenwick credit—­but Phoebe, brought up in frugal ways, to loathe the least stain of debt, hated to claim it, and went there in the dusk, that she might not be seen.

Meanwhile not a line from John to tell her that his pictures had gone in to the Academy.  She saw a paragraph, however, in the local papers describing ‘Show Sunday.’  Had John been entertaining smart people to tea, and showing his pictures, with the rest?  If so, couldn’t he find ten minutes in which to send her news of it?  It was unkind!  All her suspicions and despair revived.

As she carried her child back from the village, tottering often under the weight, gusts of mingled weakness and passion would sweep over her.  She would not be treated so—­John should see!  She would get her money for her work and go to London—­whether he liked it or no—­tax him with his indifference to her—­find out what he was really doing.

The capacity for these moments of violence was something new in her—­probably depending, if the truth were known, on some obscure physical misery.  She felt that they degraded her, yet could not curb them.

And, in this state, the obsession of the winter seized her again.  She brooded perpetually over the doleful Romney story—­the tale of a great painter, born, like her John, in this Northern air, and reared in Kendal streets, deserting his peasant wife—­enslaved by Emma Hamilton through many a passionate year—­and coming back at last that the drudge of his youth might nurse him through his decrepit old age.  She remembered going with John in their sweetheart days to see the house where Romney died, imbecile and paralysed, with Mary Romney beside him.