rom what he must tell her; but
he was suddenly confident of his ability to convince her of the superior
importance of the actuality of what they together might make of the
future. He was accustomed to the bending of circumstance to his will; in
the end he would prove stronger than any hesitancy she might, perhaps,
reveal. His desire to have her had grown to such proportions that he
could not, for an instant, think of existence without her as an intimate
part. He even mentally determined when he should go to the city, the
jeweller's, for the square emerald and flowered pearls. He would do over
the rooms where he had lived in the thin formality of his marriage with
Phebe, settle an amount on Essie ... shredding flesh. It would do the
living woman no more injury than the dead. Oranges and brandy, satin and
gold and ease.

He wrote, through Stephen Jannan, to Essie Scofield that afternoon,
stating the generous terms of his final arrangement with her, making it
plain that all personal contact between them had reached an end.
Hereafter she must exclusively address any unavoidable communications to
Mr. Jannan. She disregarded this in a direct, inevitably complaining,
laborious scrawl. However, he could read through it her obvious relief
at complete independence. She would, she thought, stay where she was for
a little ... a period of perfunctory sentimentality followed. He
destroyed the letter, turning with deep pleasure to the message from
Graham Jannan that he would bring Susan Brundon and Mary to Myrtle Forge
the following day.

His mother, with Amity Merken like a timid and reduced replica at her
back, greeted the Jannans and Miss Brundon at the door. Jasper Penny
came forward from the smoking room, to the right of the main entrance;
where the men retired for an appetizer of gin and bitters. The older man
was garbed with exact care. His whiskers were closely trimmed on either
side of his severe mouth and shapely, dominant chin; and his sombre
eyes, under their brows drawn up toward the temples, held an unusual
raillery. Amity Merken, he learned, had desired to stay away from the
supper table; but, to her distress, he forced her into a chair set by
himself. Susan sat at the other end of the table, in the place that had
been Phebe's. He gazed at her with a satisfaction without surprise; for
it seemed to him that the woman beyond him had always occupied the fore
of his existence. She wore pale grey, the opening at her neck fi