XXVII

At Shadrach his customary decision returned; he went about, or sat reading, well-ordered, cool-appearing, dogmatic.  He learned from the Evening Post that Mariana was at Warrenton.  She had carefully described to him the Virginia country life, the gaiety and hard riding of the transplanted English colonies; and he pictured her at the successive horse shows, in the brilliant groups under the Doric columns of the porticoes.  Then, he saw, she had gone north; he found her picture in a realistic Egyptian costume with bare, painted legs at an extravagant ball.  He studied her countenance, magnifying it with a reading glass; but he saw nothing beyond a surface enjoyment of the moment.

Then, to his utter surprise, on an evening after dinner, when he was seated in the settling dusk of the porch, intent on the grey movements of his familiar owls, a quick step mounted the path, and James Polder appeared.

“I wanted to ask about Miss Jannan,” the latter stated frankly and at once.  Howat Penny cleared his throat sharply.  “I believe she is well,” he stated formally.  “You will find it cooler here.”  It struck him that the young man was not deficient in that particular.  More, of still greater directness, followed.  “I suppose you know,” Polder stated, “that I want to marry her ... and she won’t.”

“I had gathered something of the sort,” the other admitted.  “It’s natural, in a way.”  Polder proceeded gloomily:  “I’d take her away from so much.  And, yet, look here—­you can shut me up if you like—­what’s it all about?  Can you tell me that?” Howat Penny couldn’t.  “I’m not to blame for that old mess any more than you.  And it’s not my fault if something of—­of which you think so much came to me by the back door.  I’ve always wanted what Mariana is,” he burst out, “and I have never been satisfied with what I could get.  And when I saw her, hell—­what’s the use!

“Any one in Harrisburg will tell you I am a good man,” he reiterated, at a slightly different angle.  “When you kick through out of that racket of hunkies and steel you’ve done something.  Soon I’ll be getting five or six thousand.”  He paused, and the other said dryly, “Admirable.”  The phrase seemed to him inadequate; it sounded in his ear as unpleasantly as a false note.  Yet he was powerless to alter it, change its brusque accent.  The personal tone of Polder’s revelations was inherently distasteful to him.  He said, rising, “If you will excuse me I’ll tell Rudolph you will be here.”

“But I won’t,” Polder replied; “there’s a train back at eleven.  I have to be at the mills for the day shift to-morrow.  I came out because I had to talk a little about Mariana.”  He had deserted the more formal address.  “And I wanted to tell some one connected with her that I have gimp of my own.  I know why she won’t marry me, and it’s a small reason; it would be small in—­”

“Hold up,” Howat Penny interrupted, incensed.  “Am I to understand that you came here to complain about Miss Jannan’s conduct?  That won’t do, you know.”