standing by, were messengers of terror and despair to this ignorant and yet sentimental Westmoreland girl.  Why should they be written at all to her John, her own husband?  No nice woman that she had ever known wrote long letters to married men.  What could have been the object of writing these pages and pages about John’s pictures and John’s prospects?—­affected stuff!—­and what was the meaning of these appointments to see pictures, these invitations to St. James’s Square, these thanks ’for the kind and charming things you say’—­above all, of the constant and crying omission, throughout these delicately written sheets, of any mention whatever of Fenwick’s wife and child?  But of course for the two correspondents whom these letters implied, such dull, stupid creatures did not exist.

Ah! but wait a moment.  Her eye caught a sentence—­then fastened greedily on the following passage: 

’I hardly like to repeat what I said the other day—­you will think me a very intrusive person!—­but when you talk of melancholy and loneliness, of feeling the strain of competition, and the nervous burden of work, so that you are sometimes tempted to give it up altogether, I can’t help repeating that some day a wife will save you from all this.  I have seen so much of artists!—­they of all men should marry.  It is quite a delusion to suppose that art—­whatever art means—­is enough for them, or for anybody.  Imagination is the most exhausting of all professions!—­and if we women are good for nothing else we can be cushions—­we can “stop a chink and keep the wind away.”  So pay no attention, please, to my father’s diatribes.  You will very soon be prosperous—­sooner perhaps than you think.  A home is what you want.’

Kind and simple sentences!—­written so innocently and interpreted so perversely!  And yet the fierce and blind bewilderment with which Phoebe read or misread them was natural enough.  She never doubted for a moment but that the bad woman who wrote them meant to offer herself to John.  She was separated from her husband, John had said, declaring of course that it was not her fault.  As if any one could be sure of that!  But, at any rate, if she were separated, she might be divorced—­some time.  And then—­then!—­she would be so obliging as to make a ‘cushion,’ and a home, for Phoebe Fenwick’s husband!  As to his not being grand enough for her, that was all nonsense.  When a man was as clever as John, he was anybodies equal—­one saw that every day.  No, this creature would make people buy his pictures—­she would push him on—­and after a while—­

With a morbid and devastating rapidity, a whole scheme, by which the woman before her might possess herself of John, unfolded itself in Phoebe’s furious mind.

Yet, surely, it would only want one word from her—­from her, his wife?—­

She felt herself trembling.  Her limbs began to sink under her.  She dropped upon a chair, sobbing.  What was the use of fighting, of protesting?  John had forgotten her—­John’s heart had grown cold to her.  She might dismay and trample on her rival—­how would that give her back her husband?