She brooded perpetually over the doleful Romney story--the tale of a great painter, born, like her John, in this Northern air, and reared in Kendal streets, deserting his peasant wife--enslaved by Emma Hamilton through many a passionate year--and coming back at last that the drudge of his youth might nurse him through his decrepit old age.

She remembered going with John in their sweetheart days to see the house where Romney died, imbecile and paralysed, with Mary Romney beside him.
'I would never have done it--_never_!' she said to herself in a mad recoil.

'He had chosen--he should have paid!' She sat closer and closer at her work, in a feverish eagerness to finish it, sleeping little and eating little.

When she wrote to her husband it was in a bitter, reproachful tone she had never yet employed to him.

'I have had one nice letter from you this winter, and only one.