sound of his
breath. "Good mercy on us!" she said to herself. "Is it his wraith, and
has he come to harm in London?" But the dark patch of his face moved,
and he began his long demonstration to her that a man need not be dead
to be dreadful. "Is there anything you want of me, Miss Melville?" the
clipped voice had asked. It was, so plainly the cold answer to an ogle
that she gazed about her for some person who deserved this reproach and
whom he had called by her name in error. But of course there was no one,
and she realised that he had come back from London her enemy, that this
accusation of her boldness was to be the favourite weapon of his enmity,
and that he found it the more serviceable way to accuse her of making
advances to him as well as to the client from Rio.

"I want nothing," she said, and left him. Since there was nowhere else
for her to go, she was obliged to wait in the lobby beside the
umbrella-stand till he came out, quirked his head at her suspiciously,
and went into his father's room. She perceived that there had been no
need for him to go into her room save his desire to make this gesture of
hate towards her. It came to her then that, although an accusation could
not hurt one if it was false, the accuser could hurt by the evil spirit
he discharged. If a man emptied a jug of water over you from a top
window in the belief that you were a cat, the fact that you were not a
cat would not prevent you from getting wet through. In the midst of her
alarm she smiled at finding an apt image. There were still intellectual
refuges. But very few. Every day Mr. Philip convinced her how few and
ineffectual. He never now, when he had finished dictating, said, "That's
all for the present, thank you," but let an awkward space of silence
fall, and then enquired with an affectation of patience, "And what are
you waiting on, Miss Melville?" He treated her infrequent errors in
typing as if she was a simpering girl who was trying to buy idleness
with her charm. And he was speaking ill of her. That she knew from Mr.
Mactavish James's kindnesses, which brightened the moment but always
made the estimate of her plight more dreary, since just so might a
gaoler in a brigand's cave bring a prisoner scraps of sweeter food and
drink when the talk of her death and the thought of her youth had made
him feel tenderly. Only that morning he had padded up behind Ellen and
set a white parcel by her typewriter. "Here's some taiblet for you,