What was the use of fighting, of protesting?
John had forgotten her--John's heart had grown cold to her.

She might dismay and trample on her rival--how would that give her back her husband?
Oh, how could he, how _could_ he have treated her so! 'I know I was ill-tempered and cross, John,--I couldn't write letters like that--but I did, _did_ love you--you know, you know--I did!' It seemed as though she twined her arms round him, and he sat rigid as a stone, with a hard, contemptuous mouth.

A lonely agony, a blackness of despair, seized on Phoebe, as she crouched there, the letters on her lap, her hands hanging, her beautiful eyes, blurred with tears and sleeplessness, fixed on the picture.

What she felt was absurd; but how many tragedies--aye, the deepest--are at bottom ridiculous! She had lost him; he cared no more for her; he had passed into another world out of her ken; and what was to become of her?
She started up, goaded by a blind instinct of revenge, seizing she scarcely knew what.

On the table lay a palette, laden with some dark pigment with which Fenwick had just been sketching in part of his new picture.