She caught up her child, who flung her arms round her mother’s neck, nestling on her shoulder.

‘Oh, well, if you’re going to take it like that—­’ said the other, with a laugh.

‘I am taking it like that, you see,’ said Phoebe, walking to the door and throwing it wide.  ’You’d better go, Miss Morrison.  I am sure I can’t imagine why you came.  I should have thought you’d have had sorrow enough of your own, without trying to make it for other people.’

The other winced.

‘Well, of course, if you don’t want to know the truth, you needn’t.’

Phoebe laughed.

‘It isn’t truth,’ she said.  ’But if it was—­Did you want to know the truth about your father?’ Her white face, encircled by the child’s arms, quivered as she spoke.

‘Don’t you abuse my father,’ cried Bella, furiously.

Phoebe’s eyes wavered and fell.

‘I wasn’t going to abuse him,’ she said, in a choked voice.  ’I was sorry for him—­and for your mother.  But you’ve got a hard, wicked heart—­and I hope I’ll never see you again, Miss Morrison.  I’ll thank you, please, to leave my house.’

The other drew down her veil with an affected smile and shrug.  ’Good-bye, Mrs. Fenwick.  Perhaps you’ll find out before long that my friend wasn’t such a fool to write that letter—­and I wasn’t such a beast to tell you—­as you think now.  Good-bye!’

Phoebe said nothing.  The girl passed her insolently, and left the house.

Phoebe put the child to bed, sat without touching a morsel while Daisy supped, and then shut herself into the parlour, saying that she was going to sit up over her work, to which only a few last touches were wanting.  It had been her intention to go with the carrier to Windermere the following day in order to hand it over to the shop that had got her the commission, and ask for payment.

But as soon as she was alone in the room, with her lamp and her work, she swept its silken, many-coloured mass aside, found a sheet of paper, and began to write.

She was trying to write down, as nearly as she could remember, the words of the letter which Bella had shown her.

’Didn’t you tell me about a man called John Fenwick, who painted your portrait?—­a beastly thing you couldn’t abide?  Well, they say he’s going to be awfully famous soon, and make a pile of money.  I don’t know him, but I have a friend who knows one of the two men who used to lodge in the same house with him—­I believe they’ve just moved to Chelsea.  He says that Mr. Fenwick will have two ripping pictures in the Academy, and is sure to get his name up.  And, besides that, there is some lord or other who’s wild about him—­and means to buy everything he can paint.  But I thought you said your man was married?—­do you remember I chaffed you about him when he began, and you said, “No fear—­he is married to a school-teacher,” or something of that sort?  Well, I asked about