A riddle that one shrinks
To challenge from the scornful sphinx.
D. G. Rossetti.

The doctor\'s verdict was unhesitating enough. Phyllis\'s doom, as more than one who knew her foresaw, was sealed. The shock and the exposure had only hastened an end which for long had been inevitable. Consumption, complicated with heart disease, both in advanced stages, held her in their grasp; added to these, a severe bronchial attack had set in since the night of the snowstorm, and her life might be said to hang by a thread. It might be a matter[Pg 258] of days, said the cautious physician, of weeks, or even months.

"Would a journey to the south, at an earlier stage of her illness, have availed to save her?" Gertrude asked, with white, mechanical lips.

It was possible, was the answer, that it would have prolonged her life. But almost from the first, it seemed, the shadow of the grave must have rested on this beautiful human blossom.

"Death in her face," muttered Mrs. Maryon, grimly; "I saw it there, I have always seen it."

Meanwhile, people came and went in Upper Baker Street; sympathetic, inquisitive, bustling.

Fanny, dismayed and tearful, appeared daily at the invalid\'s bedside, laden with grapes and other delicacies.

"Poor old Fan," said Phyllis; "how shocked she would be if she knew everything. Don\'t you think it is your duty, Gerty, to Mr. Marsh, to let him know?"

Aunt Caroline drove across from Lancaster Gate, rebuke implied in every fold of her handsome dress.

"I cannot think," she remarked to her[Pg 259] friends, "how Gertrude could have reconciled such culpable neglect of that poor child\'s health to her conscience."

Gertrude avoided her aunt, saying to herself, in the bitterness of her humiliation: "It is the Aunt Carolines of this world who are right. I ought to have listened to her. She understood human nature better than I."

The Devonshires, who had not long returned from Germany, were unremitting in their kindness, the slackened bonds between the two families growing tight once more in this hour of need.

Lord Watergate made regular inquiries in Baker Street. Gertrude found his presence more endurable than that of the people with whom she had to dissemble; he knew her secret; it was safe with him and she was almost glad that he knew it.

Gertrude had written a brief note to Lucy, telling her that Phyllis was very ill, but urging her to remain a week, at least, in Cornwall.

"She will need all the strength she can get up," thought Gertrude. She herself was performing prodigies of work without any conscious effort.

[Pg 260]

Frozen, tense, silent, she vibrated between the studio and the sick-room, moving as if in obedience to some hidden mechanism, a creature apparently without wants, emotions, or thoughts.

She had gathered from Phyllis\' cynically frank remarks, that it was by the merest chance she had not been too late and that Darrell had returned to The Sycamores.

"We were going to cross on our way to Italy that very night," Phyllis said. "We drove to Charing Cross, and then the snow began to fall, and I had such a fit of coughing that Sidney was frightened, and took me home to St. John\'s Wood."

Gertrude, who had received these confidences in silence, turned her head away with an involuntary, instinctive movement of repugnance at the mention of Darrell\'s Christian name.

"Gerty," said Phyllis, who lay back among the pillows, a white ghost with two burning red spots on her cheeks, "Gerty, it is only fair that I should tell you: Sidney isn\'t as bad as you think. He went away in the summer, because he was beginning to care about me too much; he only came back because he simply couldn\'t[Pg 261] help himself. And—and, you will go out of the room and never speak to me again—I knew he had a wife, Gerty; I heard them talking about her at the Oakleys, the very first day I saw him. She was his model; she drinks like a fish, and is ten years older than he is——I put that in the letter about getting married, because I didn\'t quite know how to say it. I thought that very likely you knew."

Gertrude had walked to the window, and was pulling down the blind with ............