father's. It was he who had all the glamour for her. He and she were like
members of some forbidden secret society who know one another but may not
recognize one another. Knowledge they had in common, the same secret of
life, the father and the child. But the child stayed in the camp of her
mother, honourably, and the father wandered outside like Ishmael, only
coming sometimes to sit in the home for an hour or two, an evening or two
beside the camp fire, like Ishmael, in a curious silence and tension,
with the mocking answer of the desert speaking out of his silence, and
annulling the whole convention of the domestic home.

His presence was almost an anguish to Winifred. She prayed against it.
That little cleft between his brow, that flickering, wicked, little smile
that seemed to haunt his face, and above all, the triumphant loneliness,
the Ishmael quality. And then the erectness of his supple body, like a
symbol. The very way he stood, so quiet, so insidious, like an erect,
supple symbol of life, the living body, confronting her downcast soul,
was torture to her. He was like a supple living idol moving before her
eyes, and she felt if she watched him she was damned.

And he came and made himself at home in her little home. When he was
there, moving in his own quiet way, she felt as if the whole great law of
sacrifice, by which she had elected to live, were annulled. He annulled
by his very presence the laws of her life. And what did he substitute?
Ah, against that question she hardened herself in recoil.

It was awful to her to have to have him about--moving about in his
shirt-sleeves, speaking in his tenor, throaty voice to the children.
Annabel simply adored him, and he teased the little girl. The baby,
Barbara, was not sure of him. She had been born a stranger to him. But
even the nurse, when she saw his white shoulder of flesh through the