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 had halted at sight of them, stood Naomi, staring.

She was breathless, and beneath a carelessly pinned hat, from which wisps of hair escaped, her face showed red and shining as a midsummer day. For one dreadful moment the three remained silent, staring at each other. Lily Shane stared with a kind of bored indifference, but there was in Naomi's eyes a hurt look of bewilderment. Suddenly she turned back, as if she meant to go away again without speaking to either of them. Philip knew the expression at once. She had looked thus on the day that Lady Millicent appeared out of the forest with the Arab marching before her. It was the look of one who was shut out from something she could not understand, which frightened her by its strangeness.

It was Lily Shane who moved first. The burnt cigarette dropped from her fingers and she stamped on it. The action appeared to stir Naomi into life.

"Philip," she said. "I came to tell you that your Pa has come home." 

It was Emma herself who saw him first. Returning flustered and upset from the call upon Mary Conyngham, she entered the slate-colored house closing the door stormily behind her. She would have passed the darkened parlor (where since Naomi's departure the shades were always kept drawn to protect the carpet), but, as she explained it afterward, she "felt" that there was some one in the room. Peering into the darkness, she heard a faint sound of snoring, and, as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she discerned the figure of a man lying on her best sofa, with his feet resting on the arm. He was sleeping with his mouth open