venture by the burning lake. And all at once he felt inexplicably sorry for her. She had a way of affecting him thus when he least expected it.
"Come," said Emma, composed and efficient once more. "You're both shivering."
The transfer to a smelly, broken-down cab was accomplished quickly, since missionaries have little need for worldly goods and Philip and Naomi had only what they had bought in Capetown.
On the way up the hill, the snow blew in at the cracks of the cab windows, and from time to time Emma, talking all the while, leaned forward and patted Philip's knees, her large face beaming. Philip sat back in his corner, speaking only to answer "Yes" or "No." No one paid any heed to Naomi.
Elmer Niman was waiting for them at the slate-colored house, seated gloomily in the parlor before the gas-logs by the side of his wife, a fat, rather silly woman, who was expecting hourly her second child, conceived, it seemed, almost miraculously after an hiatus of ten years and conscientious effort in that direction. Emma held her in contempt, not only because she was the wife of her brother, but because she was a bad housekeeper and lazy, who sat all day in a rocking-chair looking out from behind the Boston fern in her bow-window, or reading sentimental stories in the women's magazines. Moreover, Emma felt that she should have accomplished much sooner the only purpose for which her brother had married—an heir to inherit his pump works. And when she gave the matter thought, she decided, too, that Mabelle had deliberately trapped her brother into matrimony.
But there was no feeling of hostility between them,
