"I don't want anything!" he said. But he found the coffee scorching his palate and coursing hotly down his throat. He found Mrs. Kraft by his side, as he started to fold things into his bag with hands which, uselessly suspended at the wrists, seemed to be lumps of lead. A shirt fell from his fingers to the floor as though it were woven of metal threads. Mrs. Kraft bent quietly to the shirt, folded it and tucked it away; the boy for one moment swung round to look at her, through a gap in the clouds which had gathered about his head. "What's been wrong with me all this time?" he speculated. "I've never seen this woman before, I've never been in the same room!" She had passed repeatedly from his vision like a cart going by on a crowded road--bearing no lineaments of her own, being merely a thing of which his senses had been half-conscious. Was she stern, forbidding? He did not know. Was she, as she seemed now, a grave-eyed woman, quiet, full of pity? How could he argue it out now, while the straps were fumbling from his ineffectual fingers, and like a vigilant automaton, her hands had usurped his own? "Harry Levi!" he heard her shout into the garden. "Go with Philip Massel to the station and carry his bag for him!" She mumbled a difficult word of sympathy and the blank door lay between him and Mrs. Kraft. Three and four and five times Harry Levi asked, "Is she chucking you out, Massel, or wot is it, eh?" He had no quarrel with Harry Levi. There was no reason why he should not be civil to Harry Levi; but his lips would not move, and the roof of his mouth was like burnt crust. Harry Levi relapsed into an injured and simmering silence. There were minutes of waiting at the station, minutes blank and ugly and high like the wall of a factory. The train came hurtling in from among the hills, uttering as it approached the station a lugubrious and prolonged howl. The howl reverberated through all the corners of Philip's heart, rocking, shuddering, dismally dying away. He was in the train at last. "I must face the fact, I must face the fact!" Chu--chu--chu! the train went, chu--chu--chu! "Face the fact! Face the fact!" As he lay in the corner of the carriage, huddled like a discarded coat, he realized that the fool's paradise in which he had lived lay about him futile and desolate. A puff of wind and the walls had tottered, there was a groaning of uprooted beams, a smell of hot dust, overhead the intolerable eye of the sun looking sourly down! Fool he had been! Had he not seen her dying before his eyes, year by year, day by day! A little specious voice whispered, "But Channah says she's only ill. She doesn't say--not that! Perhaps it won't ... really, Philip, you can't tell ... perhaps...!" "Dangerously ill!" Philip countered, "Dangerously ill!" "Quite, I see! But not--not the other thing.... Other people have been dangerously ill and yet, you know...."