trap that had been a present from the miller, and Katie
Jacka, with a tight-lipped smile upon her face and a heart full of
contempt for a mistress whom privately she considered no better than
herself, was hovering between kitchen and passage when they drove up,
with a large bouquet of bought flowers swaddled in a stiff paper frill
ready as an offering. Boase came over after supper, and when Phoebe,
piqued by a conversation which she could not share and--what she
resented still more--by the efforts of the two men to include her in it,
had gone upstairs, then Ishmael and the Parson sat and smoked and
chatted, and for the first time all the past month lifted its
deadweight and life seemed more as it had been in the old days.

It was in the winter that Archelaus reappeared, and the first that Cloom
heard of it was a casual word dropped by Katie as she waited at table.
"So Cap'n Arch'las is back among us," she remarked cheerfully, after the
manner of Cornish servants, who see no harm in imparting items of gossip
as they hand a dish; "they do say he'm rare and changed, though 'zackly
how I don't knaw. Simme 'tes enough to make a man come home a nigger,
going so much to the lands where the folk are all black."

Ishmael was startled by the news, but, to hide the fact, began to joke
Katie on her ideas of the population of the American continent, when a
little sound from Phoebe caught his attention. She had gone very
white, and she tried to push her chair away from the table, making a
gesture as though she wanted to be free of its confining edge; but her
hands seemed too weak to accomplish the act, and she let them fall into
her lap. Ishmael sprang up and went round to her, sharply bidding the
staring Katie to bring cold water; in a moment or two Phoebe had
conquered her faintness and was smiling timidly at him. When he was
alone and out of doors he thought over the incident, but without
exaggerating it to himself. He had always guessed that Archelaus had at
one time been attracted by Phoebe; he supposed that her refusal of him
was at the back of the former's departure. Now that Archelaus had
returned it was not unnatural, considering her marriage and the bad blood
between himself and his brother, that she should feel nervous. He was
sorry for her, and wondered, not for the first time, whether it would not
be possible, now he himself was less green and prickly, and had settled
into a scheme of life that need not, ill-feeling apar