nder creature, very young; with a little
golden head on a thin neck, features childishly cut, and eyes that
made the chief adornment of a simple face. The lines of the brow, the
lids and lashes, and the clear brown eye itself were indeed of a most
subtle and distinguished beauty; they accounted, perhaps, for the
attention with which most persons of taste and cultivation observed
Fenwick's wife. For the eyes seemed to promise a character, a career;
whereas the rest of the face was no more, perhaps, than a piece of
agreeable pink-and-white.

She wore a dress of dark-blue cotton, showing the spring of her
beautiful throat. The plain gown with its long folds, the uncovered
throat, and rich simplicity of her fair hair had often reminded
Fenwick and a few of his patrons of those Florentine photographs which
now, since the spread of the later Pre-Raphaelites and the opening of
the Grosvenor Gallery, were to be seen even in the shops of country
towns. There was a literary gentleman in Kendal who said that Mrs.
Fenwick was like one of Ghirlandajo's tall women in Santa Maria
Novella. Phoebe had sometimes listened uncomfortably to these
comparisons. She was a Cumberland girl, and had no wish at all to be
like people in Italy. It seemed somehow to cut her off from her own
folk.

'John is late!' said a voice beside her. An elderly woman had stepped
out of the cottage porch. Miss Anna Mason, the head-mistress of
an endowed girls school in Hawkshead, had come to spend a Saturday
afternoon with her old pupil, Phoebe Fenwick. A masterful-looking
woman--ample in figure, with a mouth of decision. She wore a grey
alpaca dress, adorned with a large tatted collar, made by herself, and
fastened by a brooch containing a true-lover's knot in brown hair.

'He'll have stayed on to finish,' said Phoebe, looking round. 'Where's
Carrie?'

Miss Mason replied that the child wouldn't wait any longer for her
supper, and that Daisy, the little servant, was feeding her. Then,
slipping her arm inside Mrs. Fenwick's, Miss Mason looked at the
sunset.

'It's a sweet little cottage,' she said, shading her eyes from the
fast-sinking orb, and then turning them on the tiny house--'but I dare
say you'll not be here long, Phoebe.'

Mrs. Fenwick started.

'John told Mr. Harrock he'd pay him rent for it till next Easter.'

Miss Mason laughed.

'Are you going to let John go wasting his time here till next Easter?'

The arm she held moved involuntarily.