“Thank you; perhaps I’d better—­the last.”  Rudolph appeared, and conducted the young man above.  Howat Penny sat suddenly, his lips folded in a stubborn line.  Mariana had behaved outrageously; she must be familiar with the whole, miserable, past episode; she had given him some very bad moments.  He had a personal bitterness toward that old, unhappy affair, the dereliction of his dead grandfather—­it had been, he had always felt, largely responsible for his own course in life; it had, before his birth even, formed his limitations, as it had those of his father.

The latter had been the child of a dangerously late marriage, a marriage from which time and delay had stripped both material potency and sustaining illusion.  Jasper Penny had been nearing fifty when his son was born; and that act of deliberate sacrifice on the part of his wife, entering middle age, had imposed an inordinate amount of suffering on her last years.  Their child, it was true, had been of normal stature, and lived to within a short space of a half century.  But then he had utterly collapsed, died in three days from what had first appeared a slight cold; and, throughout his maturity, he had been a man of feverish mind.  His disastrous, blind struggle against the great, newly discovered iron deposits of the Middle West was characteristic of his ill balance.  And, in his own, Howat Penny’s, successive turn, the latter told himself again, he had paid part of the price of his grandfather’s indulgence.

It was incorporated in the Penny knowledge that Susan Brundon had refused to marry Jasper while the other woman was alive.  The latter had died, some years after the disgraceful publicity of the murder and trial; the wedding had then taken place; but it seemed to Howat Penny to have been almost perfunctory.  Yes, he had paid too, in the negative philosophy, the critical sterility, of his existence.  He recognized this in one of the disconcerting flashes of perception that lately illuminated him as if from without.  Some essential proportion had been disturbed.  He looked up, at a slight sound, and saw Mariana standing before him.  His expression, he knew, was severe; he had been quite upset.

“I can see,” she proceeded slowly, “that I have been very wicked.  I didn’t realize, Howat, that it might affect you; how real all that old stir might be.  I am tremendously sorry; you must know that I am awfully fond of you.  It was pure, young selfishness.  I was afraid that if I spoke first you wouldn’t let him come.  And it was important—­I must see him and talk to him and think about it.  You can realize mother and Kingsfrere!”

“Where did you meet him?” he demanded shortly.

“With Eliza, at a meeting,” she went on more rapidly.  “He’s terribly brilliant, and a steel man.  Isn’t it funny?  The Pennys were steel, too; or iron, and that’s the same.  I wish you could be nice to him or just decent, until—­until I know.”

“Mariana!” he exclaimed, rising.  “You don’t mean that you are really—.  That you—­”