that anybody had ever hurt anybody deliberately, except long-dead soldiers sent by mad kings to make what history books, to mark the unusual horror of the event, called massacres.  She had begun to know better late last Monday afternoon.  She had returned to her little room after taking down some shorthand notes from dictation, and, because there was a thick, ugly twilight and she had come dazzled by the crude light on Mr. Mactavish James’s desk, had moved about for some seconds, with a freedom that seemed foolishness as soon as she knew she was observed, before she saw that Mr. Philip was standing at the hearth.

“Have you come straight off the train?” it was in her mind to say.  “Will I ask Mrs. Powell to get you some tea?” But he looked strange.  The driving flame of the fire cast flickering shadows and red lights on the shoulders and skirt of his greatcoat, so he looked as though he was performing some evil incantatory dance of the body, while his face and hands and feet remained black and still.  There was no 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