All the way back to the Flats neither of them spoke at all: Philip, because there was a black anger and rebellion burning in him, and Naomi, because if she had tried to speak, she would have wept. She felt as though she were dead, as if in a world made up of Philip and his father and Emma she no longer had any existence. She was only a burden who annoyed them all. And the dress . . . it was only sort of "funny-looking."
He left Naomi at the door of the flat with an abrupt "good-night." It was after midnight, and the moon was rising behind the hill crowned by Shane's Castle, throwing a blue light on the mist that hung above the Flats. In the far distance the mist was all rosy with the light from four new furnaces that had begun once more to work. The strike was slipping slowly into defeat, and he understood that it meant nothing to him any longer. He had almost forgotten Krylenko.
As he passed through the rusted gates of the park, there drifted toward him from among the trunks of the dead trees, a faint, pungent odor that was hauntingly familiar and, as he climbed the drive between the dead trees, it grew stronger and stronger, until at last he recognized, in a sudden flash of memory which brought back all the hot panorama of the lake and the forest at Megambo, that it was the smell of gunpowder, the smell that clung to his rifle when he had stood there by the barricade beside Lady Millicent killing those poor niggers. It was a faint, ghostly smell that sometimes died away altogether and sometimes came in strong waves on a warm breeze filled with the dampness of the melting snow.
At the top of the hill, the big house lay dead and blind, without a sign of life, and, as he turned the
