Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/108

 Aunt Mabelle seemed to shrink into herself, all softness and apology. "I didn't know . . . I just couldn't understand a woman carrying on like that if she wasn't." 

It was more than an hour before the midnight shift began at the Mills, and during that hour Philip walked, sometimes running, along the empty streets, through the falling snow, all unconscious of the cold. He was for a time like a madman living in an unreal world, where all values were confused, all emotions fantastic and without base: in his tired brain everything was confused—his love for his mother, his hatred for his uncle, his pity for Naomi, and his resentment at all three of them for the thing they were trying to do. He wanted to run away where he might never see any of them again, yet to run away seemed to him a cowardly thing which solved nothing. Besides, if he ran away, he would never see Mary Conyngham, and Mary had in some odd fashion become fixed in his mind, an unescapable part of the whole confusion. He must see Mary Conyngham, sometime, in some way.

He was afraid to stay, depressed by the feeling that whenever he returned to the house, he was certain to find them there—waiting, watching him. Why, a man could be driven to insanity by people like that who treated him always as if he were mad.

But worst of all, he had no longer any faith in God: there was nothing of that miraculous essence which seemed to take from one's shoulders all the burden of doubt and responsibility. He couldn't say any longer, "I will leave it to God. He will devise a way.