'Did Mrs. Morrison know—about the loan?'
'I dare say. I never heard.'
'I suppose she and the daughter'll have nothing?'
'That doesn't follow at all. Very likely he'd settled something on them, which can't be touched. A man like that generally does.'
'Poor things!' she said, shuddering. 'But, John—you'll pay it back to
Mrs. Morrison?'
'Of course I shall,' he said, impatiently—'in due time. But please remember, Phoebe, that's my affair. Don't you talk of it—to any one.'
He looked up to emphasise his words.
Phoebe flushed.
'I wasn't going to talk of it to any one,' she said, proudly, as she moved away.
Presently he took up his hat again and went out, that he might be alone with his thoughts. The rain had vanished; and a frosty sunshine sparkled on the fells, on the red bracken and the foaming becks. He took the mountain-path which led past the ghyll, up to the ridge which separates Langdale from Grasmere and Easedale. Morrison's finely wrinkled face, with its blue, complacent eyes and thin nose, hovered before him—now as he remembered it in life, and now as he imagined it in death. Hard fate! There had been an adventurous, poetic element in Morrison—something beyond the ken of the ordinary Philistine—and it had come to this. Fenwick remembered him among the drawings he had collected. Real taste—real sense of beauty—combined no doubt with the bargaining instinct and a natural love of chicanery. Moreover, Fenwick believed that, so far as a grasping temper would allow, there had been a genuine wish to help undiscovered talent. He thought of the hand which had given him the check, and had a vision of it holding the revolver—of the ghastly, solitary end. And no one had guessed—unless, indeed, it were his wife? Perhaps that look of hers—as of a creature hunted by secret fears—was now explained.