poise.  For the first time it was as though she found sufficient support in her own company and did not need to be for ever following and leaning upon other people.  To look at, sitting so withdrawn, her eyes watching something unseen of human gaze, she was perfect; even in intercourse she would have been more nearly so than ever before had it not been for the fits of irritability gave unwonted bitterness to her tongue.  There were days when nothing would please her, when she showed all her common strain in the taunts she found to fling at Ishmael and the rest of her little world.  Only Archelaus was immune, and in his presence she maintained a sullen silence, so marked that a third person with them could, if he were sensitive, feel her ever-deepening resentment emanating from her.

Archelaus himself was as though unaware of it, for he came to the house with increasing frequency.  About this time he began to walk out with a Botallack girl, the daughter of a mine captain, and indeed asked Ishmael’s congratulations on the match.  But, in his brotherly fashion, he was always eager to do anything to help Phoebe, whether it were to ride into Penzance and buy her anything she wished for, or to wait on her at home, adjusting a hammock at exactly the right height and carrying out cushions.  Only Phoebe knew the taunt that underlay every word, the subtle scheme for making her uncomfortable that he carried on under cover of his solicitude.  And she was not clever enough to combat it; when he told her she had ruined his life by marrying Ishmael, she was not brave enough to retort that he had had opportunity enough to marry her and never breathed the wish; when she hinted as much, he retorted that he had only been waiting to make more money so that she could have a position worthy of her.  He declared that all she had married Ishmael for was to get the position that should by rights have belonged to him, Archelaus.  That there had been a month of terror when she would, if he had not already left, have begged him to marry her she never told him.  That fear had been groundless and had passed, but she never forgave it him.

Since his return she could not have told what swelled her resentment the more—­that he should dare to come back at all, or that his fascination for her, the plainer to her since intimacy with another man had proved so much less wonderful, should prick at her perpetually in spite of her dislike of him.  Ishmael she still regarded as a superior being whom she admired, but the touch of Archelaus’s casual hand had power over her that was more intensified than stilled both by her resentment and her distrust.