Susan rose, gathering up her mantle, and moved to Stephen Jannan's side. He offered his arm with a formal courtesy, and together they made their way out through the corridor. Jasper, lost in a moody abstraction, waited until they had vanished; and then, with a lowered head, walked rapidly over Chestnut Street in the direction of the terminus of the railroad for Jaffa. A brigade of cars was made up; he took a place and was immediately dragged on and over the viaduct to the plane and waiting engine beyond. He could see, from the demeanour of the loungers on the Jaffa platform, that the news of the murder, his connection with it, had preceded him. To-morrow's papers would provide them with full accounts, the name of Susan Brundon among the maculate details.... The meanest cast boy in his works would regard him, the knowledge of Essie, with a leer. His mother was at the main door of Myrtle Forge, pale but composed. "Take Mr. Penny's overcoat," she brusquely directed a servant. He had never seen a more delectable supper than the one awaiting him; and he tasted most of what found its way to his plate--he owed that to the maternal solicitude secretly regarding him, hastily masked as he met his mother's gaze. Sitting later in accustomed formality the dulness of a species of relief folded him. The minor sounds of his home, the deliberate loudness of an old clock, the minute warring of his mother's bone needles, her sister's fits of coughing, painfully restrained, soothed his harried being; subjected to an intolerable strain his overwrought nerves had suddenly relaxed; he sank back in a loose, almost somnolent, state. A mental indolence possessed him; the keen incentives of life appeared far, unimportant, his late rebellions and desires inexplicable. Even the iron was a heavy load; the necessity of constantly meeting new conditions with new processes, of uprooting month by month most with which the years had made him familiar, seemed beyond his power. A faint dread crept into his consciousness; he roused himself sharply, straightened his shoulders, glanced about to see if his tacit surrender had been noticed--this lassitude creeping over him, the indifference, was, at last, the edge of the authentic shadow of age, of decay; it was the deadening of the sensibilities preceding death. He banished it immediately, and all his desire, his need, his sense of the horror of the past day, surged back, reanimated him, sent the blood strongly to its furthest confines. But, none the less, a vague, disturbing memory of the other lingered at the back of his perceptions; he had a fresh realization of the necessity for him to make haste, to take at once--before the hateful anodyne of time had betrayed his vigour--what life still, and so fully, held.