telligence. Dread lest he should cast himself out of Eugenie's
delightful presence; and the fighting life of the mind: it was by
these he was rescued, by these he ultimately conquered.

And yet, was it, perhaps, his bitterest grievance against his wife
that she had, in truth, left him _nothing_!--not even friendship, not
even art. In so wrenching herself from him, she had perpetuated in
him that excitable and unstable temper it should have been her first
object to allay, and had thus injured and maimed his artistic power;
while at the same time she had so troubled, so falsified his whole
attitude towards the woman who on his wife's disappearance from his
life had become naturally and insensibly his dearest friend, that
not even the charm of Madame de Pastourelles' society, of her
true, delicate, and faithful affection, could give him any lasting
happiness. He himself had begun the falsification, but it was Phoebe's
act which had prolonged and compelled it, through twelve years.

For a long time, indeed, his success as an artist steadily developed.
The very energy of his resentment--his inner denunciation--of his
wife's flight, the very force of his fierce refusal to admit that he
had given her the smallest real justification for such a step, had
quickened in him for a time all the springs of life. Through his
painting, as we have seen, he wrestled out his first battles with
fate and with temptation; and those early years were the years of
his artistic triumph, as they were also the years of Madame de
Pastourelles' strongest influence upon him. But the concealment on
which his life was based, the tragedy at the heart of it, worked
like 'a worm i' the bud.' The first check to his artistic career--the
'hanging' incident and its sequel--produced an effect of shock
and disintegration out of all proportion to its apparent
cause--inexplicable indeed to the spectators.

Madame de Pastourelles wondered, and sorrowed. But she could do
nothing to arrest the explosion of egotism, arrogance, and passion
which Fenwick allowed himself, after his breach with the Academy. The
obscure causes of it were hidden from her; she could only pity and
grieve; and Fenwick, unable to satisfy her, unable to re-establish his
own equilibrium, full of remorse towards her, and of despair about his
art, whereof the best forces and inspirations seemed to have withered
within him like a gourd in the night, went from one folly to another,
while his pictu