reluctantly.

'You were out?'

'I had gone to tell Watson and Cuningham the good news.'

His voice dropped.

Her hands caught each other again.

'It was that day--that very day we came to you?'

He nodded.

'But why?--what was it made her do such a thing?--go--for
ever--without seeing you--without a word? She must have had some
desperate reason.'

'She had none!' he said, with energy.

'But she must have thought she had. Can't--can't you explain it to me
any more?'

He was almost at the end of his resistance.

'I told you--how she had resented--my concealment?'

'Yes--yes! But there must have been something more--something
sudden--that maddened her?'

He was silent. She grew whiter than before.

'Mr. Fenwick--I--I have much to forgive. There is only one course
of action--that can ever--make amends--and that is--an entire--an
absolute frankness!'

Her terrible suspicion--her imperious will had conquered. Anything was
better than to deny her, torture her--deceive her afresh.

He looked at her in a horrible indecision. Then, slowly, he put his
hand within the breast of his coat.

'This is the letter she wrote me. I found it in my room.'

And he drew out the crumpled letter from his pocket-book, which he had
worn thus almost from the day of Phoebe's disappearance.

Eugenie fell upon it, devoured it. Not a demur, not a doubt, as
to this!--in one so strictly, so tenderly scrupulous. Even at that
moment, it struck him pitifully. It seemed to give the measure of her
pain.

'The picture?' she said, looking up--'I don't understand--you had sent
it in.'

'Do you remember--asking me about the sketch? and I told you--it had
been accidentally spoilt?'

She understood. Her lips trembled. Returning the letter, she sank upon
a seat. He saw that her forces were almost failing her. And he dared
not say a word or make a movement of sympathy.

For some little time she was silent. Her eyes ranged the green circuit
of the hollow--the water, the reeds, the rock, and that idle god among
his handmaidens. Her attitude, her look expressed a moral agony,
how strangely out of place amid this setting! Through her--innocent,
unconscious though she were--the young helpless wife had come to
grief--a soul had been risked--perhaps lost. Only a nature trained as
Eugenie's had been, by suffering and prayer and lofty living, could
have felt what she felt, and as she felt it.

Fumbling, Fenwick put back the letter in his pock