the valley, to fling itself on the broad sides of the pikes; the lambs
made a sad bleating; the water murmured in the ghyll beyond the house;
the very sunshine was clear and cold.

Calculations quick and anxious passed through the young wife's brain.
Debts here, and debts there; the scanty list of small commissions
ahead, which she knew by heart; the uncertainty of the year before
them; clothes urgently wanted for the child, for John, for herself.
She drew a long and harassed breath.

Phoebe Fenwick was a tall, slender 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