elaus!"

The elder brother said nothing, but slowly a look of comprehension began
to dawn in his bleared old eyes, a look that was inexpressibly sly and
yet harmless, so infantine was his whole aspect of helplessness. He
shook Ishmael's hand very slowly, then dropped it.

"I'm come home," he repeated obstinately.

CHAPTER II

ARCHELAUS, NICKY, JIM

The next day it became plain to Ishmael that Archelaus spoke the truth
when he announced that he had come home. His legs were old and stiff,
but after pottering all the morning after his brother, who suddenly felt
years younger through sheer force of contrast, he followed him
obstinately out to the four-acre field, where Ishmael had hoped to get
away from him. And Ishmael watched the rolling, as he had only the day
before watched the sowing, but with a sinking of the heart instead of
the lightening that had been his only twenty-four hours earlier. The
mere presence of Archelaus, though they were now both old men, past
rivalry, held for him an antagonism he could hide but could not keep
himself from feeling.

As the ridgy clods flattened out to a level of purplish fawn beneath the
one passing of the cumbrous roller, that yet looked so small behind the
huge mare, Ishmael felt his spirits being as flattened as the four-acre
itself. Yet even as yesterday the two horses had done, so to-day the
mare spread her powerful haunches and raised clouds of earth with each
firm impact of her gleaming hoofs; but the joy was gone from the sight.
Even Hester, the farm-dog, lineal descendant of poor Wanda, seemed to
feel the inaction in the air, and, leaving off her slavish following of
the roller, flung herself down on a stretch of field where it had
already passed, legs outspread, looking so flattened as she lay there, a
mere pattern of black and white, that the roller might have passed over
her also. Archelaus stood leaning upon a favourite stick of Nicky's that
he had taken from the hall, and commented shrewdly enough upon the
affairs of the farm. He seemed suddenly to be showing a great interest
in them, and during the days that followed this did not diminish. For
all his years his wits seemed bright; only whenever the suggestion arose
that he might be happier if he took up his quarters elsewhere his eyes
seemed actually to film over like a bird's with the blankness that
descended on them. Indeed, there seemed no real reason for getting rid
of him. He was old and strange, bu