was that hint, so ominous, that he would have left Naomi behind if she chose not to follow him. Something strange, something terrifying, she felt, had happened, for nothing else could explain this sudden deterioration of character. There was no hint of what had caused it, nothing (and her suspicions were bristling) unless it had to do with that Englishwoman. For a moment she felt that she was dealing with some intangible mystery and so was frightened.
After she had grown more calm, it occurred to her that this strange, inexplicable letter might have been caused by the fever that had attacked him twice, that it was a result of the wound he wrote of, or perhaps merely a passing wild idea—only Philip had never had any wild ideas, for you couldn't properly call his ecstatic devotion to God a wild emotion. Once, as a boy, he had had a sudden desire to become an artist, but she had changed him quickly and easily. No, he had always been a good boy who obeyed her. He did not have silly ideas.
During an hour shaken with doubts and fears, one terror raised its head above the others—the terror that after twenty-four years of careful training and control, twenty-four years spent in making him as perfect as his father had been imperfect, the blood of Jason Downes was coming into its own to claim the son which she had come long ago to think of only as her own.
The return of Philip seemed almost as great a calamity as the flight of his father. For the second time in her existence a life carefully and neatly arranged appeared to fall into ruin. How was she to explain this shameful change of Philip's heart to the Reverend Castor, the members of the church, the
