Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/176

 Philip suddenly felt too ill to speak to any one, to explain anything. McTavish had lifted him up and was carrying him toward the door, "Why you don't weigh no more than a woman—and a little woman at that."

He felt himself being lifted into McTavish's buggy. The fat man kept one arm about him, and with the other drove the horses, which on occasions pulled his hearse. At length, after what seemed to Philip hours, they drew up before the slate-colored house.

It was Emma herself who opened the door. McTavish, the debaucher of young men, she saw, had got Philip drunk, and was delivering him to her like a corpse.

"What does this mean?" she asked.

Philip managed to say feebly, "I haven't been drinking."

McTavish, still carrying him, forced his way past her into the hall. "Where do you want to put him? You've got a pretty sick boy here, and the sooner you know it the better."

They carried him upstairs and laid him on his and Naomi's bed. Naomi was in the room, and Mabelle was with her, and as they entered, she got up with a wild flutter of alarm, while McTavish explained. Philip asked for water, which Naomi went to fetch, and McTavish led Emma with him into the hall.

Downstairs, they faced each other—two middle-aged people, born to be enemies by every facet of their characters; yet, oddly enough, McTavish had once been a suitor for Emma's hand in those far-off days when Emma had chosen such a hopeless mate as Jason Downes. Sometimes, drawing deep out, of his own experience, the philosophic McTavish had wondered how