“Thank you!  I should like to!” cried Netta.

“My wife has no carriage, Lady Tatham.”

“Oh, Edmund—­we might hire something,” said his wife imploringly.

“I do not permit it,” he said resolutely.  “Good-bye, Lady Tatham.  You are like all women—­you think the cracked vase will hold water.  It won’t.”

“What are you going to do here, Edmund?”

“I am a collector—­and works of art amuse me.”

“And I can do nothing—­for you—­or your wife?”

“Nothing.  I am sorry if you feel us on your mind.  Don’t.  I would have gone farther from you, if I could.  But seven miles—­are seven miles.”

Lady Tatham coloured.  She shook hands with Netta.

Melrose held the door open for her.  She swept through the hall, and hurried into her carriage.  She and Melrose touched hands ceremoniously, and the brougham with its fine roan horses was soon out of sight.

A miserable quarrel followed between the husband and wife.  Netta, dissolved in hysterical weeping, protested that she was a prisoner and an exile, that Edmund had brought her from Italy to this dreary place to kill her, that she couldn’t and wouldn’t endure it, and that return to Italy she must and would, if she had to beg her way.  It was cruel to shut her up in that awful house, to deny her the means of getting about, to treat people who wished to be kind to her as Edmund had treated Lady Tatham.  She was not a mere caterpillar to be trodden on.  She would appeal to the neighbours—­she would go home to her parents, etcetera—­etcetera.

Melrose at first tried to check her by sarcasm—­a banter that stung where it lit.  But when she would not be checked, when she followed him into his study, wailing and accusing, a whirlwind of rage developed in the man, and he denounced her with a violence and a brutality which presently cowed her.  She ran shivering upstairs to Anastasia and the baby, bolted her door, and never reappeared till, twenty-four hours later, she crept down white and silent, to find a certain comfort in Thyrza’s rough ministrations.  Melrose seemed to be, perhaps, a trifle ashamed of his behaviour; and they patched up a peace over the arrangements for the heating of the house on which for once he had the grace to consult her.

The winter deepened, and Christmas came.  On the mountain-tops the snow lay deep, and when Netta—­who on many days never left the house—­after walking a while up and down the long corridor for the sake of exercise, would sink languidly on the seat below its large western window, she looked out upon a confusion of hills near and far, drawn in hard white upon an inky sky.  To the south the Helvellyn range stretched in bold-flung curves and bosses; in the far distance rose the sharper peaks of Derwentwater; while close at hand Blencathra with its ravines, and all the harsh splendour of its white slopes and black precipices, alternately fascinated and repelled the little Southerner, starved morally and physically for lack of sun.