CHAPTER XVI.
THE FEAR OF LIFE Stephen had intended to go back as soon as he had put his mother into the car; but she clung so tightly to his arm, and there was something so appealing in her fragile dependence, that, almost without realizing it, he found that he was sitting in front of her, and that she was taking him down to his office.
"We will leave you and go back, Stephen," she said, while a look of faintness spread over her features.

"I feel as if one of my heart attacks might be coming on." "Wouldn't you rather I went home with you ?" he inquired solicitously.
His mother shook her head and reached feebly for Margaret's hand.
"Margaret will take care of me," she replied in the weak voice before which her husband and her children had learned to tremble.
As he sat there uneasily in the stuffy car, which smelt of camphor and reminded him of a hearse, he was threatened by that familiar sensation of oppression, of closing walls.

Would he ever again be free from this impalpable terror, from this dread of being shut within a space so small that he must smother if he did not escape?
And not only places but persons, as he had found long ago, persons with closed souls, with narrow minds, produced in him this feeling of physical suffocation.
Margaret, with her serenity, her changeless sweetness, affected him precisely as he was affected by the stained glass windows of a church.
He felt that he should stifle unless he could break away into a place where there were winds and blown shadows and pure sunshine.

He admired her; he might have loved her; but she smothered him like that rich and heavy wave of the past from which he was still struggling to free himself.

For he knew now that it was not the past he wanted; it was the future.