As the years drew nearer the present their features became larger, more indistinct, their music grew louder, dissonant.  He had retired further and further from an opera, a life, with which he was increasingly out of harmony.  Or rather, he added, life moved away from the aging.  It was as if the surrounding affair became objective; as if, once a participant in a cast—­a production, however, less than grand—­he had been conducted to a seat somewhere in the midst of a great, shadowy audience, from which he looked out of the gloom at the brilliant, removed spectacle.  The final fact that had taken him from the setting of so many of his years had been the increasing expense of a discriminating existence in New York.  Again his distaste for anything short of absolute nicety had dictated the form and conditions of his living.  When the situation of his rooms had definitely declined, and the cost of possible locations—­he could not endure a club—­became prohibitive; when his once adequate, unaugmented income assumed the limitations of a mere sufficiency; and when, too, the old, familiar figures, the swells of his own period and acquaintance had vanished one by one with their vanishing halls of assembly—­he had retreated to the traditional place of his family.  He had gone back to the home of the Pennys in America.

Not, however, to Myrtle Forge itself, the true centre of his inheritance.  The house there had been uninhabited since his father’s early years; it was a closed and melancholy memento; he had reanimated a comfortable stone dwelling at Shadrach Furnace; its solid grey facade drawn out by two happy additions to the original, small square.  It had been, traditionally, at first, the house of the head furnacemen; sometime after that, perhaps a hundred years, Graham Jannan, newly married, had lived there while occupied with the active manufacture of iron; and three summers back he, Howat Penny, the last Penny now, had returned to the vicinity of Jaffa.

XXIV

The room in which he sat had two windows, set in the deep recesses of heavy stone walls, and three doors, two leading into opposite rooms and the third opening without.  The double lamp stood on a low, gate-legged table of fibrous, time-blackened oak, together with an orderly array of periodicals—­the white, typographical page of the Saturday Review under the dull rose of The Living Age and chocolate-coloured bulk of the Unpopular, Gil Blas, the mid-week Boston Transcript and yesterday’s New York Evening Post.  The table bore, in addition, a green morocco case of dominoes; a mahogany box that, in a recess, mysteriously maintained a visible cigarette; a study of Beethoven, in French; an outspread volume by Anatole France, Jacques Tournebroche, in a handsome paper cover; a set of copper ash trays; and a dull red figurine, holding within its few inches the deathless spirit of a heroic age.  An angle