Naomi was like her pale, weak one; and Lily Shane and Mary and Uncle Elmer and even Krylenko and McTavish were like theirs. It was impossible to escape your own face. His father, he thought, couldn't escape that face that hung in the parlor.
When the door opened and he stepped into the parlor, he saw that his father hadn't escaped his face. He felt, with a sudden sensation of sickness, that his father was even worse than his face. It was the same, only a little older, and the outlines had grown somehow dim and vague from weakness and self-indulgence. Why, he thought again, did he ever come back?
But his mother was happy again. Any one could see that.
And then his father turned and looked at him. For a moment he stared, astonished by something in the face of his son, something which he himself could not perhaps define, but something which, with all the sharp instincts of a sensual nature he recognized as strange, which had little to do with either himself or Emma. And then, perhaps because the astonishment had upset him, the meeting fell flat. The exuberance flowed out of Jason Downes. It was almost as if he were afraid of his son—this son who, unlike either himself or Emma, was capable of tragedy and suffering. His eyes turned aside from the burning eyes of his son.
"Well, Philip," he said, with a wild effort at hilarity, "here's your Pa . . . back again."
Philip shook hands with him, and then a silence fell between them.
But it was Jason Downes who dominated the family gathering. Philip, silent, watched his father's spirits mounting. It seemed to him that Jason had set him-
