placed it there on the table, Naomi's hand that had last touched it.
Naomi had known who the woman was. In the next moment he had, in some unaccountable way, a curiously clear vision of an iron bed with a small depression where some one had knelt to pray.
After a long time, he rose, and, leaving the handkerchief on the table, went down the stairs once more. He never returned again to the room above the stable.
While Philip sat in the dust and soot of the dead stable, his father waited for him at the flat. He danced the twins for a time on his knee, and set them crowing by giving a variety of imitations of birds and animals which he had learned in Australia, but, after a time, the old spirit flagged. He wasn't the same gay, blithe creature that Emma found awaiting her in the darkened drawing-room. Even the waxed mustaches seemed to droop a little with weariness. For Jason was growing old in body, and he knew it. "My sciatica," he said, "will not let me alone."
"For an active, nervous man like me," he had told Emma only that morning, "there ain't much left when his body begins to get old."
Even his return home had been in a way a failure. He began now to think he ought never to have come back, Emma was the only one pleased by his return. "You'd have thought," he told himself, "that she'd have forgotten me long ago and taken to thinking about other things." It was pretty fine to have a big, handsome woman like Emma give you all her devotion.
