sorts of orgies might go on in the Flats and no one would ever know. It was awful, degrading of Philip, to have mixed himself up with such people.
And presently she began to suspect that Mary lay at the source of Philip's behavior toward Naomi. A man didn't give up living with his wife so easily unless there was another woman. A man didn't do such things. Men were different from women. "Why," she thought, "I've lived all these years without a man, and never once dreamed of re-marrying. I gave up my life to my son."
It was Jason's fault too (she thought). It was Jason's bad blood in Philip. The boy wouldn't have behaved like that if it hadn't been for his father before him. That was where the weakness lay.
And now Mary probably came to see him at that room over the stables at night, and even in the daytime, because there was nothing to stop her coming and going. No one in the Flats would care, especially now, in the midst of the strike, and the Shanes wouldn't even take notice of such a thing. Shane's Castle had always been a sort of bawdy-house, and with the old woman dead the last trace of respectability had vanished. . . .
She remembered, too, that Mary hadn't been happy with her husband. Being married to a man like that who ran after women like Mamie Rhodes did something to a woman. Why, she herself could remember times when Jason's behavior made her, out of revenge, want to be unfaithful to him; and if it could happen to her (Emma) why, what would be the effect on a godless woman like Mary Conyngham?
For a time she considered boldly the plan of going to Philip himself and forcing him to give up Mary Con-
