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, but he behaved himself and played with the children, both Ruth's couple and little Jim; he was a huge success. He ousted the grandfather—so much more vivid were his tales, so much more amusing the things he could do with a penknife and a bit of wood. Whistles, whips, boats, all seemed to grow under his gnarled old hands, with their discoloured and broken nails, as though without effort. And watching his success, knowing by some instinct he would not have told for fear of misconstruction to any but Judy, who always understood, that some malign wish to hurt lay at the springs of his brother's complaisance towards the children, Ishmael felt a stirring of the old unease that he admitted to himself was not without a leaven of jealousy.

For the Easter recess Nicky came down, and no lover ever waited for his mistress with a more high-beating heart than Ishmael did for his son. And at the back of his mind was the haunting fear of Archelaus as affecting his relations with Nicky, a fear such as he might have had had Nicky been a woman and he and Archelaus young men.

Nicky came, charming as ever. He was so full of life that his forty-odd years seemed nothing to him. He had that immense vitality, sparkling but full of reserved strength, that brings with it a sense of completeness apart from youth or age. Ishmael felt the old pang of disappointment that Nicky gave so little, repented of directly some little thing showed how Nicky was thinking of and for him. Nicky drew his brows together when he heard of his uncle's advent. He was a great stickler for the conventions, and did not like this appearance in the flesh of old family scandals that might again become a topic for busy tongues.

Archelaus was out when Nicky arrived, but when the family party was assembled on the lawn for tea he made his appearance. Everyone was there. Ruth had driven over from her Vicarage with her two little girls, with whom Jim was playing and occasionally quarrelling; Marjorie sat by Nicky and waited on him with an indulgence she generally showed him on the first day together after they had been separated for a few weeks; and even the volatile Lissa was there, in a sense, as Ruth had had a long letter from her that morning which she had brought over to read to her father. Ruth's husband, a gentle, kindly, abstracted creature, was there too, pulling his long fingers through his beard and saying very little. Ishmael liked him, but preferred him to come to the Manor rather than himself going to the Vicarage. He had never got over the idea bred in him by association with the Parson that a priest should not be married.

Archelaus wandered on to the lawn looking his most spruce; he had evidently tried to tidy himself, having shaved and put on a clean collar of extraordinarily antiquated make. His clothes might have had "American ready-made" written upon them. He advanced towards them slowly, leaning heavily on his stick.