Through his painting, as we have seen, he wrestled out his first battles with fate and with temptation; and those early years were the years of his artistic triumph, as they were also the years of Madame de Pastourelles' strongest influence upon him.

But the concealment on which his life was based, the tragedy at the heart of it, worked like 'a worm i' the bud.' The first check to his artistic career--the 'hanging' incident and its sequel--produced an effect of shock and disintegration out of all proportion to its apparent cause--inexplicable indeed to the spectators.
Madame de Pastourelles wondered, and sorrowed.

But she could do nothing to arrest the explosion of egotism, arrogance, and passion which Fenwick allowed himself, after his breach with the Academy.

The obscure causes of it were hidden from her; she could only pity and grieve; and Fenwick, unable to satisfy her, unable to re-establish his own equilibrium, full of remorse towards her, and of despair about his art, whereof the best forces and inspirations seemed to have withered within him like a gourd in the night, went from one folly to another, while his pictures steadily deteriorated, his affairs became involved, and a shrewd observer like Lord Findon wondered who or what the deuce had got hold of him--whether he had begun to take morphia--or had fallen into the clutches of a woman.
In the midst of these developments, so astonishing and disappointing to Fenwick's best friends, Eugenie de Pastourelles was suddenly summoned to the death-bed of the husband from whom she had been separated for nearly fifteen years.

It was now nearly twelve months since Fenwick had seen her; and it was his eagerness to meet her again, much more than the necessities of his new commission, which had brought him out post-haste to Paris and Versailles, where, indeed, Lord Findon, in a kind letter, had suggested that he should join them.
* * * * * Amid these memories and agitations, he found himself presently at the Gare Saint-Lazare, taking his ticket at the _guichet_.