“What ...” began Ishmael; but at a sign from Judith Nicky had put in the clutch and the car was sliding off down the drive.  Ishmael turned and went thoughtfully into the house.  He wondered whether Judy too had suffered from that same sense of a shattered atmosphere that he had since the return of Archelaus.

It seemed absurd that he should, he told himself.  He was seventy, Archelaus older; it was surely time they found it possible to live together in harmony....  And yet it was not that there was any definite bad feeling between them, that he could find any holes in the scheme of his brother’s behaviour.  It was only that Archelaus, old as he was, still retained the quality of a satyr, of something oddly malevolent, that boded ill.  Ishmael tried to break himself of the feeling, life-old with him, though for so many years forgotten, but he found that, though he could force himself not to dwell on it, beyond that he was powerless.  There was no actual harm Archelaus could do him, and he told himself repeatedly that there must be something rather hateful in himself that he could still feel this profound troubling of aversion.

He called for Jim to go over the farm with him; but the little boy was not to be found, and one of the maids told him she had seen him go off with his new uncle.  Ishmael paused to put on a big coat, for the wind was fresh although it was late in May, and then he too went out.

In the four-acre the young corn he had sown on that day of Archelaus’s return showed some four or five inches of green blades.  Lest it should grow too fast and rank, the roller had been busy over it the day before, and, though the elastic tissue of its frail-looking growth was already springing erect again, the field still showed alternate stripes of light and dark, marking this way and that of the roller’s passing, as though some giant finger had brushed the nap of this fine velvety tissue the wrong way.

Ishmael leant upon the gate and looked at the corn, mechanically noting its good condition, but feeling no pleasure at the sight.  It was for him as though a blight had come over the Cloom of his idolatry, and he told himself it could never again be the same for him.  He felt very old and tired, though it was still early in the day.  His brain was working slowly; it took him a long time to register upon it his thoughts about anything at which he was looking, and the knowledge of this distressed him.

Judy had gone and was not coming back—­she had said so.  That aroused no acute sensation in him, but rather a dreary feeling of being sorry.  Judy was old in spite of her vigour and her ever-quick tongue, which age had quickened.  She had always been articulate, he always the reverse, and on this morning he felt a dumb impotency even towards himself.  He stared out over the acres filmed with that thin, fine green, and past it to the wine-coloured ploughed lands and the pastures, and, turning a little against