police inquiries which had been
initiated went on intermittently for a while, then ceased; the waters
of life closed over Phoebe Fenwick and her child.

What was Fenwick's present feeling towards his wife? If amid this
crowded Paris he had at last beheld her coming to him, had seen the
tall figure and the childish look, and the lovely, pleading eyes,
would his heart have leapt within him?--would his hands have been
outstretched to enfold and pardon her?--or would he have looked at her
sombrely, unable to pass the gulf between them--to forget what she had
done?

In truth, he could not have answered the question; he was uncertain
of himself. Her act, by its independence, its force of will, and the
ability she had shown in planning and carrying it out, had transformed
his whole conception of her. In a sense, he knew her no longer. That
she could do a thing at once so violent and so final, was so wholly
out of keeping with all his memories of her, that he could only think
of the woman who had come in his absence to the Bernard Street studio,
and defaced the sketch of Madame de Pastourelles, as in some sort a
stranger--one whom, were she to step back into his life, he would
have had to learn afresh. Sometimes, when anything reminded him of her
suddenly--as, for instance, the vision in a shop-window of the very
popular mezzotint which had been made from the 'Genius Loci' the year
after its success in the Academy--the pang from which he suffered
would seem to show that he still loved her, as indeed he had always
loved her, through all the careless selfishness of his behaviour. But,
again, there were many months when she dropped altogether--or seemed
to drop--out of his mind and memory, when he was entirely absorbed in
the only interests she had left him--his art, his quarrels, and his
relation to Eugenie de Pastourelles.

There was a time, indeed--some two or three years after the
catastrophe--when he passed through a stage of mental and moral
tumult, natural to a man of strong passions and physique. Even in
their first married life, Phoebe had been sometimes jealous, and with
reason. It was her memory of these occasions that had predisposed her
to the mad suspicion which wrecked her. And when she had deserted him,
he came violently near, on one or two occasions, to things base and
irreparable. But he was saved--first by the unconscious influence, the
mere trust, of a good woman--and, secondly, by his keen and advancing
in