She slowly approached the drawing, while a sob mounted in her throat.  She was still in the grip of that violent half-hysterical impulse which had possessed her since the evening of Bella Morrison’s visit.  Nights almost sleepless, arrangements made and carried out in a tumult of excitement, a sense of impending tragedy, accepted, and almost welcomed, as the end of long weeks of doubt and self-torment, which had become at last unbearable—­into this fatal coil of actions and impressions, the young wife had been sinking deeper and deeper with each successive hour.  She had neither friend nor adviser.  Her father, a weak inarticulate man, was dying; her stepmother hated her; and she had long ceased to write to Miss Anna, because it was she who had urged John to go to London!  All sane inference and normal reasoning were now indeed, and had been for some time, impossible to her.  Fenwick, possessed by the imaginations of his art, had had no imagination—­alack!—­to spend upon his wife’s case, and those morbid processes of brain developed in her by solitude, and wounded love, and mortified vanity.  One hour with him!—­one hour of love, scolding, tears—­would have saved them both.  Alone, she was incapable of the merest common sense.  She came prepared to discover the worst—­to find evidence for all her fears.  And for the worst she had elaborately laid her plans.  Only if it should turn out that she had been an unkind, unreasonable wife, wrongly suspicious of her husband, was she uncertain what she would do.

With dry, reddened eyes, she stared at the portrait of the woman who must have stolen John from her.  The mere arrangement of the room seemed to her excited nerves a second outrage;—­Mrs. Gibbs’s reception of her and all that it had implied, had been the first.  What could this strange illumination mean but that John’s thoughts were taken up with his sitter in an unusual and unlawful way?  For weeks he could leave his wife without a letter, a word of affection.  But before going out for an hour, he must needs light these lamps and place them so—­in order that this finicking lady should not feel herself deserted, that he should still seem to be admiring and adoring her!

And after all, was she so pretty?  Phoebe looked at the pale and subtle face, at the hair and eyes so much less brilliant than her own, at the thin figure, and the repose of the hands.  Not pretty at all!—­she said to herself, violently—­but selfish, and artful, and full, of course, of all the tricks and wiles of ‘society people.’ Didn’t she know that John was married?  Phoebe scornfully refused to believe it.  Such women simply didn’t care what stood in their way.  If they took a fancy to a man, what did it matter whether he were married or no?

The poor girl stood there, seething with passion, pluming herself on a knowledge of the world which enabled her to ‘see through’ these abominable great ladies.