For a moment she simply stared at the letter, incapable of any logical thought. Her hand, which never shook, was shaking. She was for a moment, but only a moment, a broken woman. And then, slowly, she read it again to make certain that she had not read it wrongly. On reflection, she saw clearly that he was upset. The letter was hasty and disorderly in composition; the very handwriting had changed, losing its round, precise curves, here and there, in sudden jagged and passionate downstrokes. And at the end he did not write, as he always did, “We pray for you every night.” Beneath the shower of light from the wild-rose dome she tried to fathom the meaning of the letter, struggling meanwhile with a sudden sense of loneliness such as she hadn’t experienced since she sat in the same spot years before reading Jason’s last letter. Coming home, giving up the work of the Lord in blackest Africa! (Just after she had read aloud before all those women one of his interesting letters.) Philip, who had always placed his hopes unfalteringly in the hope of the Lord. _I’ve made a mistake in my calling._ What could he mean by that? How could one mistake a call from the Lord? He was, she saw, in earnest. He had not even waited for a letter from her. If she could only have written she would have changed everything. And there was that hint, so ominous, that he would have left Naomi behind if she chose not to follow him. Something strange, something terrifying, she felt, had happened, for nothing else could explain this sudden deterioration of character. There was no hint of what had caused it, nothing (and her suspicions were bristling) unless it had to do with that Englishwoman. For a moment she felt that she was dealing with some intangible mystery and so was frightened. After she had grown more calm, it occurred to her that this strange, inexplicable letter might have been caused by the fever that had attacked him twice, that it was a result of the wound he wrote of, or perhaps merely a passing wild idea--only Philip had never had any wild ideas, for you couldn’t properly call his ecstatic devotion to God a wild emotion. Once, as a boy, he had had a sudden desire to become an artist, but she had changed him quickly and easily. No, he had always been a good boy who obeyed her. He did not have silly ideas. During an hour shaken with doubts and fears, one terror raised its head above the others--the terror that after twenty-four years of careful training and control, twenty-four years spent in making him as perfect as his father had been imperfect, the blood of Jason Downes was coming into its own to claim the son which she had come long ago to think of only as her own.