And so Remorse, and anguished Pity, sprang up beside her—­grey and stern comrades—­and she walked between them night and day.  John, a lonely failure in England—­poor and despised.  And she, an exile here, with her child.  And this dumb, irrevocable Time, on which she had stamped her will, so easily, so fatally, flowing on the while, year by year, towards Death and the End!—­and these voices of ‘Too late!’ in her ears!

But still the impulse of return grew—­mysteriously it seemed—­independently.  And other facts and experiences came strangely to its aid.  In the language of Evangelicalism which had been natural to her youth, Phoebe felt now, as she looked back, that she had been wonderfully ‘led.’  It was this sense, indeed, which had softened the humiliation and determined the actual steps of her homeward pilgrimage; she seemed to have been yielding to an actual external force in what she had done.

For it had not been easy, this second uprooting.  Carrie, especially, had had her own reasons for making it difficult.  And Phoebe had never yet had the courage to tell her the truth.  She had spoken vaguely of ‘business’ obliging them to take a journey to England—­had asked the child to trust her—­and taken refuge in tears and depression from Carrie’s objections.  In consequence, she had seen the first shadow descend on Carrie’s youth; she had been conscious of the first breach between herself and her daughter.

In a sudden agony, she walked back to the window in her own room, looking this time, not towards Elterwater and the post, but towards Dungeon Ghyll and the wild upper valley.

Anna Mason had taken Carrie for a walk.  At that moment, on Phoebe’s prayer, she was telling the child the story of her father and mother.

Phoebe’s eyes filled.  She was, in truth, waiting for judgement—­at the hands of her husband—­and her daughter.  Ever since their flight together, Carrie had been taught to regard her father as dead.  As the years went on, ‘poor papa’ was represented to her by a few fading memories, by the unframed picture which her mother kept jealously locked from sight, which she had been only once or twice allowed to see.

And now?  Phoebe recalled the anguish of that night, when Carrie, returning to her mother in Surrey, from a day’s expedition to town, with a Canadian friend, described the queer, passionate, grey-haired man—­’Mr. Fenwick, they called him’—­whom she had seen directing the rehearsal at the Falcon Theatre.  Phoebe had a vision of herself leaning back in her chair, wrapped in shawls, feigning the exhaustion and blindness of nervous headache—­while the child gave her laughing account of the scene, in the intervals of kissing and comforting ’poor mummy.’

And that drive from Windermere, beside Miss Anna, with Carrie opposite!—­Carrie excitable, happy, talkative—­her father’s child—­now absorbed in a natural delight, exclaiming at the beauty of the mountains, the trees, the river, catching her mother’s hand, to make her smile too, and then in a sudden shyness and hardness, looking with her deep jealous eyes at the unknown friend opposite, wondering clearly what it all meant, resenting that she was told so little, and too proud to insist on more—­or, perhaps, afraid to pierce what might turn out to be the unhappy or shameful secret of their life?