the gate, he saw the house, a pale pearl-grey on this clear day.  He turned to his left and saw cultivated land far as the cliffs where once waste had been; and here and there on the rolling slopes of the moor beyond he saw a little grey farmstead that was his too, whose tenants owed their prosperity to him.  And for the first time in his life the sight gave him no joy.  Archelaus had drawn a blight over it all.  He might tell himself with the resentful anger of old age that the thing was all wrong, absurd even; but that availed nothing.  Years had not softened the fact that the presence of Archelaus had power to spoil things for him, now as when he had been a child.  Archelaus was somewhere now with little Jimmy, telling him tales of the far places of the earth, which he, Ishmael, had never seen, never would see.  Jim was listening entranced, his bright brown eyes shining as Nicky’s did when he was moved, as Phoebe’s had been wont to do.

A bright whistling sounded from the direction of the house, and Nicky came to the gate leading from the farmyard and stood looking across it.  He saw Ishmael, and, waving his hat, began to come over the field towards him.  And quite suddenly a certain balm slipped into Ishmael’s grieved heart.  At least he had Nicky ... and that, after all, was what Cloom meant.  Cloom might in all these years have failed him as far as she herself was concerned, leaving him feeling bereft and lost, but it was not in her power or in that of Archelaus to spoil whatever since Nicky’s birth had been his chief reason for loving Cloom.  This was not a blind love as the mere instinct for acres had been—­this was the motive power of love itself.  He waited in sudden gladness by the gate.

The day sharpened as it went on, cold rain blew up, and the inmates of the Manor began to be anxious that Archelaus had not yet come in with little Jim.  No one seemed to know where he had gone or taken the child.  As the day wore on Marjorie, usually a very placid, strong-minded mother, began to grow frantic.  She declared that never since he came to the place had she considered Archelaus quite sane or responsible, and that Ishmael ought to have known better to keep such a queer old man on in the same house as a child.  Nicky tried to comfort her before he went out for the third time on his horse to try and find some trace of the two missing members of the family.  Ishmael could do nothing but wander from room to room, oppressed by a sense of fear such as he had not suffered from since Nicky had gone to South Africa.  Once he shook his fist in the air as he waited by himself in the dining-room, whence he could watch the drive, and the facile, burning tears of age ran down his face as he spoke aloud of Archelaus in a cracked old voice he hardly recognised for his own.  If Archelaus had let the boy come to any harm, if he had done him any hurt....  Back on his mind came flooding old memories of Archelaus—­the night in the wood, for instance....  He had done wrong to believe that even at eighty years old that deep malevolence had faded.  His instinct had been the thing all his life long which had made genius for him, and he had been wrong not to trust it now he was old.  It was probably the only thing about him which had not aged, and he should have let himself go with it....