That night he sat with Mary in the Victorian drawing-room, planning their future. It was the first time he had ever entered the house, and he found the quiet, feminine sense of order in the big room soothing and pleasant, just as Emma had found it melancholy and depressing. But he hadn't come to her to be comforted and petted, as he had always done before: he was a different Philip, pathetic, and yet hard, kindly, yet cold in a way, and aloof. He did not speak of the stable, nor even of Naomi, and Mary, watching him, thought, "Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps after all he's been sensible and put all that behind him," and then, in the next moment, she saw him close his eyes suddenly. She knew what he was seeing . . . that room in the boarding-house where Naomi had died. "They ought never to have let him go there," she thought. "If any of them had any common sense, they wouldn't have let him do it." But she knew, too, that no one could have stopped him. He had gone because he saw it as his duty, a kind of penance: he was the sort who would fnever spare himself anything.
And, reaching over, she touched his hand, but there was no response. After a time, he said, "It's all right, Mary. It's just a headache. I've been having them lately."
They couldn't marry and stay there in the Town with every eye watching them, waiting for some bit of scandal: but Philip seemed obsessed with the idea that they must be married at once. At first she thought it might be because he wanted her so much, and then
