l, that he valued her
sympathy and good-will. Already the phrases of the letter, warm and
eloquent, yet restrained, began to flow through his mind. It might be
an unusual thing to do; but she was no silly conventional woman; she
would understand.

By Jove! Welby was perfectly right. The hand was too big. It should be
altered at the next sitting. Then he sprang up, found pen and paper,
and began to write to Phoebe--still in the same softened and agitated
state. He wrote in haste and at length, satisfying some hungry
instinct in himself by the phrases of endearment which he scattered
plentifully through the letter.

* * * * *

That letter found Phoebe on a mid-March morning, when the thrushes
were beginning to sing, when the larches were reddening, and only in
the topmost hollows of the pikes did any snow remain, to catch the
strengthening sunlight.

As she opened it, she looked at its length with astonishment. Then the
tone of it brought the rushing colour to her cheek, and when it
was finished she kissed it and hid it in her dress. After weeks of
barrenness, of stray post-cards and perfunctory notes, these ample
pages, with their rhetorical and sentimental effusion, brought new
life to the fretting, lonely woman. She went about in penitence.
Surely she had done injustice to her John; and she dreaded lest any
inkling of those foolish or morbid thoughts she had been harbouring
should ever reach him.

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 l