The sentence re-echoed in the silence that followed it. It had been uttered in a shout. Gypo’s voice had suddenly broken loose from his lungs into a spontaneous expression of the emotion that shook him into a passion of feeling, looking at Mrs. McPhillip. He felt suddenly that he must express that feeling forcibly. Not by a whisper, or a plain restrained statement, but by a savage shout that would brook no contradiction. The shout wandered about in the room long after its sound had vanished. Nobody spoke. Its force was too tremendous. Everybody, for some amazing reason or other, sniffed at the smell of fried sausages that now permeated the atmosphere of the kitchen. The smell came from the pan still left on the fireplace, containing the sausages that had been cooking for Francis Joseph McPhillip’s supper when the police came. He had been so tired that he told his mother to bring his supper to him in bed. So they still remained there, on the side of the fireplace, forgotten. Then the initial amazement wore off and everybody looked at Gypo. They saw him sitting on the floor, doubled up, bulky in his blue dungarees that clung about his thighs like a swimming suit, with his little round hat perched on his massive head, still staring at Mrs. McPhillip’s face as if drawn by a magnet, unconscious of the amazement he had caused by his shout. And alone of all the people in the room, Mrs. McPhillip was not amazed. She had not started. She had not moved her eyes. Her lips still moved in prayer. Her mind was drawn by another magnet to the contemplation of something utterly remote from the people in that room, utterly remote from life, to the contemplation of something that had its roots in the mystic boundaries of eternity. Then Jack McPhillip jumped to a sitting posture on the bed. He grabbed at the old tweed cap that had fallen off his grizzled grey head. “Oh, it’s you that’s in it, is it?” he cried. “Ye son o’ damnation!” He glared at Gypo so ferociously that his face began to twitch. His face was so burned by the sun that it was almost black at a distance. At close quarters it looked a reddish brown. He had a glass eye. The other eye looked straight across the glass one, as if guarding it. He had to look away from a man in order to see him. This distortion in his vision had always filled his wife with terror, so that now she trembled whenever he looked at her. It was so uncanny, his looking at space like that. His body was short and slight. He was fifty years old. He jumped off the bed and stood on the floor in his grey socks, his blue waistcoat unbuttoned, the little white patch of linen on the abdomen of his grey flannel shirt puffing in and out with his heavy breathing, his throat contorting, his hands gripping and ungripping restlessly.