And the house, newly painted and whitewashed after the strange happenings, which were now past, the house was filled with a hatred that rose on every hand, as it were the very demoniacal bloom of that strange secret; a hatred centering upon that silent woman, who was too languid to hate and only delighted in silent tantalizing; a jealous hatred of the father for the son, when he saw him too often sitting beside his step-mother, begging, in spite of his own hatred, for something, the father did not know what; a hatred of the daughter for the mother; a hatred in which all this family-life was being wrecked. How it had all gradually come about Van Oudijck did not know. He sadly regretted the time when he was blind, when he had seen his wife and children only in the light in which he wished to see them. That time was past. Like the strange happenings of not so long ago, a hatred was now rising out of life, like a miasma out of the ground. And Van Oudijck, who had never been superstitious, who had worked on coolly and calmly in his lonely house, with the incomprehensible witchcraft all about him; who had read reports while the hammering went on above his head and his whisky-and-soda changed colour in his glass; Van Oudijck for the first time in his life--now that he saw the gloomy glances of Theo and Doddie; now that he suddenly discovered his wife, growing more brazen daily, sitting hand-in-hand with young De Luce, her knees almost touching his--became superstitious, believing in a hidden force which lurked he knew not where, in India, in the soil of India, in a deep-seated mystery, somewhere or other, a force that wished him ill because he was a European, a ruler, a foreigner on the mystic, sacred soil. And, when he saw this superstition within himself, something so new to him, the practical man, something so strange and incredible to him, a man of single-minded, masculine simplicity, he was afraid of himself, as of a rising insanity which he began to perceive deep down within himself.