etter 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.

'I would never have done it--_never_!' she said to herself in a mad
recoil. 'He had chosen--he should have paid!'

She sat closer and closer at her work, in a feverish eagerness to
finish it, sleeping little and eating